Krishna Kumar

Contents
Preface ix·
1. Introduction 1
PART I: CHALLENGE OF THE PAST
2. Children and the Past 15

3. Frames of Popular Perception 29
4. Ideology and Textbooks 49
PART II: RIVAL HISTORIES
5. Freedom Struggle As a Narrative 69

6. A Beginning Lo~ated 87
7. Awakening and Anxiety 102
8. Unity and Break-Up 126
9. Contrary Imaginations 160
10. Glory and Grief: The Final Years 195
PART III: FUTURE PROSPECTS
11. Children Write About Partition 225

12. History and Peace 239
List of Textbooks 247

Notes 249
Index 265
Preface
The idea' of this book has a rather long and fortuitous

history. Its seed was sown in the late 1970s during the
course of neighbourly conversations I had with a
Commonwealth scholar from Peshawar who lived in the
room facing mine at the St George hostel in Toronto.
Talking to him was like looking through an intricately
carved screen. At times, even the ordinary daily news
seemed to acquire contrasting meanings for us. I was
convinced that our education, especially what we knew
of-and as-history, had something to do with our
perceptions.
That seed of curiosity about Pakistan's system of
education lay dormant for. nearly two decades. One
opportunity for me to nurture it arose in the late 1980s
when Professor Stella Sandahl procured a handful of
Pakistani textbooks of history for me. I wrote an article
about the perspective I noticed in those texts, and left it at
that, hoping that the gradual strengthening of SAARC
X Preface
would encourage closer examination of issues like the

quality of textbooks. Not surprisingly perhaps, the SAARC
initiative did not grow mature enough to work on such
matters of detail-the term senior civil servants routinely
use for everything that lies beyond the broad rhetoric of
educational policy.
Then, a decade later, I found myself plunged into this
project. This is how it happened. One sultry morning in
August 1997, a waiter at the India Intern..tional Centre,
New Delhi, requested me to share my table with a senior
guest because the dining hall was unusually crowded. I
shortly discovered that I was in the company of India's
former ambassador to Saudi Arabia. We talked about
India's relations with her neighbour situated immediately
to its west, especially about our lack of curiosity to study
its society and culture. I was reminded of my Pakistani
neighbour in Toronto, and of the trouble I used to have
making sense of his views. By the time I had finished my
south Indian breakfast and was walking to the library, I
had decided to devote myself to studying Pakistan. By the
evening of that day I had scribbled a preliminary draft of
a proposal outlining a comparative study of the
representations of modern history in Indian and Pakistani
school textbooks.
I was fortunate to be awarded a Jawaharlal Nehru
fellowship to carry out this study. I am thankful to the
Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund for selecting me, and to
Delhi University and my department for granting me leave
to avail of it. Many friends, including some of my old
students, helped me with the numerous tasks involved in
this ambitious project. I can hardly name them all, but I
must mention Azra, Iffat, Neeraj, Mohammed Khaliq,
P~dma, Naresh, Shirley and Kusum. Dr Mubarak Ali, Dr
Preface XI
Rubina Saigol, Mr Anwar Kamaal, Arifa Noor and Yvette

Rosser helped me in different ways to understand Pakistan.
I gratefully acknowledge their kindness. I owe a special
word of thanks to Dr Joachim Oesterheld, who invited me
to the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin, allowing
me to widen my perspective on the pedagogic challenge
that history presents as a school subject.
Throughout the period of my Nehru fellowship, and
later while I was still writing, I was assisted by Rosamma
Thomas. Her reliable enthusiasm-in reading, finding,
organizing, editing-and her trenchant humour enabled me
to function with speed and efficiency. I wish to thank her.
I had the privilege of receiving an elaborate commentary
on the completed draft of this book from Professor Sumit
Sarkar. His insights and suggestions helped me to go
through the final round of revisions. I am deeply grateful
to him. Needless to say, Professor Sarkar is in no way
responsible for the problems some readers might find in
my judgement and style.
My mother, Mrs Krishna Kumari, went to school and,
later on, taught in Sialkot and Lahore. Her vivid memories
of these cities, and her narratives of picketing as a young
girl during the Civil Disobedience Movement, seeing Nehru
walk a few steps ahead of her in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad),
listening to Tagore through a rainy night, and of many
other scenes of that kind, made the history of the national
movement and Partition come alive for me. I am happy to
thank her.
I wish to thank Frances and Sunil, my wife and son,
who cheerfully endured and generously participated in this
long and overwhelming preoccupation of mine. Sustaining
the arduous effort this study implied once it had started,
and holding together the hundreds of details it generated,
xii Preface
would have been impossible without the guarantee of

being appreciated at home.
Finally, I wish to re1'1ember two scholars whose
encouragement and insights enriched this study: S. Shukla
and Ravinder Kumar. Sadly, they did not live to see its
completion.
Krishna Kumar
1
Introduction
Although the focus of this book is rather specific,

working on it forced me to relate to a wide range of issues.
One normally believes academic research to be an ivory
tower exercise, unfazed by changes in the socio-political
climate. Trained and accustomed though I am to working
in such an environment, the topic of this book made me
remarkably susceptible to changes I saw occurring in Indo-
Pak relations while I was writing. I started my work in
April 1998, and within a month, the tension between India
and Pakistan worsened quite radically, following the testing
of atomic bombs in Pokhran and Chagai. Why should this
tension affect my study, I wondered, at first, for apart from
the extraordinary escalation of tension in ·May that year,
there was nothing new about it. And in any case, I recalled,
my initial motivation to undertake this study was a response
to the hostility and bitterness that had characterized the
2 Prejudice and Pride
Inda-Pak relationship since my childhood. Indeed, the

'relevance' of the study was linked in my mind to the
permanent hostility between the two countries. Heightening
of tension would make my study even more relevant, I
thought, and I tried to feel somewhat excited about it.
Sadly, this did not help me to overcome the nagging
thought that the modest contribution my study might
make towards a better understanding between the two
countries may prove to be too little and too late.
My despair arose from two sources. One had to do
with the general gloom that prevails in the systems of
education in both India and Pakistan. Anyone writing on
children's education in either country cannot avoid a
certain degree of despondency. India and Pakistan are
among the least literate societies in the world. Both have
neglected the education of their children in a determined
manner, by giving it a low priority. Besides, both countries
have a history of unheeded recommendations on how to
improve education. These recommendations were made at
regular intervals by commissions and committees appointed
by their governments. No one writing about education
today can ignore this fact. Moreover, the teaching of
history-the focus of .this study-arouses only political
concern in both India and Pakistan. It never translates itself
into a concern for the children who are at the receiving
end. In systems which neglect even basic areas like literacy
and numeracy, who would bother about how well history
is taught? This question was crucial for me because I was
going to confine myself to the study of textbooks dealing
with the freedom movement, a relatively tepid area,
compared to ancient and medieval history which have
aroused controversies in both countries.
During the course of this study I had the occasion to
Introduction 3
visit Lahore. Apart from other institutions, I was able to

visit the Central Training College which was established
by the British in 1890 as the first major institution
responsible for training teachers. After my return, I found
that no one in my own institute showed any curiosity
about the current state of the institution which had once
served as a model for all future teachers' training
organizations in India, including our own. This academic
apathy, I discovered, extended to all aspects of life in
Pakistan, and it was not confined to my institute.
That was the second reason for my despondency.
Negative feelings towards Pakistan are, of course,
widespread, and I have no doubt that such sentiments are
more than matched by anti-India feelings in Pakistan.
Hostility between nations usually arouses curiosity, which
also serves as an instrument of defence by generating
reliable knowledge about the enemy. This is why the US
has so many experts on the former Soviet Union. Why
hasn't this logic worked for India and Pakistan? Indian
scholars who can be considered Pakistan experts are rare;
India experts in Pakistan are rarer. Both countries tend to
rely on retired diplomats and journalists when they need
information about the other. It is usually not knowledge
that is sought; opinion suffices to keep the machinery of
tension working. But the lack of demand does not explain
the absence of acadeµiic curiosity in both countries towards
the other.
Both countries live with the assumption that they
know the other. The 'other' is, after all, a former aspect of
the 'self'; hence there is no room for the curiosity that
foreignness normally awakens. Physical vicinity compounds
this feeling. If India and Pakistan were geographically
apart, there might have been a chance for the kind of
anxiety that lack of news about a hostile relative residing

far away causes. India and Pakistan are politically so far
apart and geographically and culturally so close that there
is no room for an epistemic space between them. Indians
tend to feel that they know Pakistan. In seminars, senior
participants joyfully intersperse their pre-Partition
knowledge with snippets about meeting Pakistani delegates
in Paris or New York. There are not many Indian scholars
who can discuss Pakistan's economy or politics at any
length, with an eye on details and the mode of evolution.
Knowledge about Pakistan has little worth in India. And
the case of knowledge about India in Pakistan is not very
different. There are hardly any scholars there who can read
Hindi or any other Indian language. Academic life has
greatly shrunk in Pakistan over the recent decades, and
what little space there was earlier for scholarly curiosity
about India has disappeared. Stigmatization of India as a
Hindu country has also aided this process. In general, the
power of stereotypes in both countries has proved too
strong to allow scope for any serious enquiry and knowledge
about each other.
My own experience of studying Pakistan, in order to
make sense of the textbooks used there, adds a few nuances
to the sketch I have drawn earlier. Colleagues to whom I
spoke about this project during the last two years promptly
said that my research was highly interesting and important.
From the way they said it, I had the disconcerting feeling
that 'interesting' really meant strange, and 'important'
meant political. People who wanted to know about the
issue in some detail assumed that history is taught in a
highly twisted fashion in Pakistan, and that that is what
my study will highlight. When they said that my study was
topical, they meant that it will establish beyond doubt that
Introduction 5
Pakistan has sowed the seeds of permanent hostility towards

India by teaching its younger generations a false version of
the past. This kind of assumption about the intention
underlying my study was quite disturbing, particularly
when it was made by liberal-minded people with intellectual
credentials who should know what a comparative study
implies.
Despite the despair I felt while I was working on it, the
study is here. Basically, it consists of an enquiry into the
perceptions of the past that Indian and Pakistani children
encounter at school. My specific preoccupation is with
education, but I believe it extends to constructing a common
basis of enquiry for the two societies. History taught to the
young is always a contemporary concern, and for obvious
reasons. Every society worries about how its young will
think about the past because knowledge of the past has so
much to do with attitudes and beliefs that are important
for a society's survival. As nation-states, modern societies
place a heavy responsibility on the historian who writes
for the young. Political leaders and the other elite of newly
established nation-states tend to perceive education mainly
as a means of imparting a strong sense of national identity
to the young. Older nation-states of the West also use
education for this purpose, but the pedagogic space available
in their systems of education is wider, and it allows other
purposes of education to be pursued as well. Nation-
building assumes so dominant a position among the aims
of children's education in the relatively younger nation:
states or post-colonial states that there is little opportunity
to pursue its other aims, particularly the aims relevant to
intellectual development. The impoverished state of schools
and the overwhelming importance attached to examinations
contribute to the dilution of these other aims. As a school
subject, history comes under the strain of nation-building

rather more than other subjects. A single-minded focus on
the goal of inculcating a national consciousness often
makes the teaching of history ~ means of ideological
indoctrination. The role of history in arousing an interest
in the past and respect for it, besides imparting the means
of studying it, gets totally sidelined when the ideology of
nationalism becomes the sole ground for organizing
historical knowledge in syllabi and textbooks.
In both India and Pakistan, the teaching of history has
been a matter of considerable debate, and in that sense
history appears to be less neglected compared to the other
school subjects. But this impression turns out to be an
erroneous one when we consider the nature of the debates
that have surrounded the teaching of history. In both
countries, the debates have been essentially political, with
no pedagogical value or substance. In India, school history
has been bogged down by a controversy over the secular
versus communal perspectives. The representation of the
Middle Ages has been one focus of this controversy;
another has been the issue of whether the Aryans were
indigenous or outsiders. Though these issues look esoteric,
they have a bearing on contemporary political formations
and the questions addressed by these formations, particularly
the question of how the state treats religious minorities. In
Pakistan, controversies surrounding the teaching of history
have been more directly political. The nature, and not just
the ideological character, of the Pakistani nation-state has
been at stake in these controversies. During the regime of
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, an official policy to rewrite history
for school-children started to take shape; and under Zia-ul-
Haq it became one of the numerous initiatives to construct
a full-fledged ideological apparatus under the banner of
Introduction 7
'Islamization'. Moves of a similar nature are now afoot in

India, but we do not know how far they will go, given the
volatile phase of governance through which India is passing
and the inherent strength that democracy appears to have
acquired. The common point to note in the debates on
history in both countries is the lack of interest in looking
at history syllabi and textbooks from the child's perspective.
In the absence of such a perspective, it is hardly surprising
that the debat·ing parties have paid no attention whatsoever
to how badly history is taught, and how little history
teaching engages itself with the child's intellectual
development and interest in the past.
Some readers will perhaps be disappointed by my
decision to confine this study to the portrayal of the
freedom struggie in school textbooks. The controversies I
have mentioned continue to be alive in both India and
Pakistan, and a full-scale comparison of how the long past
of the subcontinent is presented to children in the two
countries would undoubtedly arouse great interest. My
decision to focus on the freedom struggle is based on two
grounds. One has to do with a policy I proposed in my
· earlier book, Learning from Conflict, that we ought to pay
greater pedagogic attention to the history of modern India
than we do at present. 1 My main argument was that
modern history has far greater potential for engaging
children in activities connected with the study of social
sciences than the history of earlier periods has. They, too,
ought to be studied, perhaps with an archaeological
orientation, but the modern period, which includes the
anti-colonial struggle and the post-independence period,
can form an area of wide-ranging investigation. Pedagogically
too, it promises children a more convenient use of source
material, literature and biography-an important component
of history teaching but a rare practice in both India and

Pakistan. By examining the representation of the freedom
struggle in the textbooks of the two countries, I hope to
establish the potential of the modern period as subject
matter for a pedagogically defensible introduction to history
during the secondary school years. At present the freedom
struggle comes in at the tail-end of a tiring introduction to
Indian history during Classes VI, VII and VIII. The present
structure of the history curriculum and the dull manner in
which textbooks represent history leave the children with
little enthusiasm for the subject by the time they are first
introduced to the freedom movement towards the second
half of the school session in Class VIII.
My other reason to focus on the freedom struggle was
that I believed it would promote a better understanding
between India and Pakistan by helping readers in both
countries to grasp how a common recent past is looked at
by the other. Memory of the anti-colonial move~ent and
Partition continues to be a part of the symbolic world that
shapes children's socialization. School textbooks are a
prominent means by which this knowledge gets transmitted;
television and cinema, news and the celebration of politically
significant days are among other means. Knowledge of the
freedom struggle plays a key role in socializing the younger
generation into nationally-upheld attitudes and beliefs.
Perhaps we can go farther. By the time a child becomes a
young citizen, he or she is expected to share the inimical
mindset that characterizes political relations between the
two countries. It is quite likely that some of the roots of
this mindset lie in the nature of the knowledge given to
children regarding how the two countries became free and
separate. If my study helps in the search of these roots, it
will make a small contribution towards better mutual
understanding and reconciliation.
Introduction 9
Early on, I found to my astonishment that studies of

this kind had not been done before. Barring a paper by
Avril Powell and another by Navnita Chadha Behera,
there had not been any previous attempts at such a
comparative study of Indian and Pakistani textbooks. 2
Further, there was no record of joint attempts made by
Indian and Pakistani historians, along the lines of Japanese
and South Korean historians, to read and analyse history
textbooks. 3 While conversing with historians, I felt that an
interest of this kind had just not been perceived as being
worthy of pursuit. It was perhaps one more example of the
Iron Curtain that hangs between the two countries. It
discourages any serious desire to know how the other
thinks. And it keeps the two countries from building a
common pool of knowledge about themselves and the
world. Only cable television and the film industry manage
to bridge the deep divide, but the fare they offer to the two
audiences contributes just as much to peace as it does to
enmity and prejudice.
A worry which haunted me from the beginning was
whether an Indian could claim to be a balanced and
impartial reader of textbooks written for Pakistani children.
This apprehension was obviously a part of my larger
anxiety to act as a trained comparative researcher. As a
method in the social sciences, comparison of two societies
along any dimension presents the. challenge of
comprehending alternative perspectives and practices. When
the two societies under comparison have a hostile
relationship, and the researcher belongs to one of them,
impartiality demands great self-restraint and imagination.
Appljed in the context of education, the comparative
medfod requires wide-ranging awareness of the cultural
and political environment of each society. Acquiring such
an awareness presented a special challenge in the case of

this study. Pakistan is a part of the Indian memory. There
is a mental block to affording it the status of a proper
object of enquiry, given the wistful Indian feeling that
Pakistan was, until the other day, a part of 'us'. Pakistan
today is as foreign to India as Sri Lanka or Burma. The
Buddhist parable about a mature tree not being the same
entity that its sapling was, is quite relevant to the common
Indian habit of regarding Pakistan as a society too familiar
to deserve systematic study.
The sample of textbooks I have examined was drawn
mainly to cover the two kinds of schools we find in both
India and Pakistan. The gap between these two kinds of
schools-'public' and ordinary-is wider in Pakistan than it
is in India, and this is reflected in the textbooks used in
elite Pakistani schools. Privately published textbooks used
in Sind and those published by the pre-eminent textbook
board of Punjab are both represented in my sample for
Pakistan. It also ensures the coverage of middle and senior
secondary level textbooks. Luckily for me, the textbooks
used in Urdu medium schools are translations of textbooks
written in English or vice versa. Regional variation is also
quite narrow in contemporary Pakistan. Since the
establishment of a federal curriculum wing in the late
1970s, centralization of syllabus design and textbook writing
increased quite rapidly. Use of textbooks for the ideological
consolidation of Pakistan was already in practice; it
intensified during the Zia regime, and the textbooks written
in that phase have remained in the market, with minor
modifications and updating. Punjab's status in Pakistani
political and economic life is reflected in textbooks as well.
This, of course, applies to the state controlled system of
· education. Textbooks used by elite public schools are
richer in content and reflect a wider national space.
Introduction 11
The Indian case, and therefore my sample for India, is

somewhat different. The National Council of Educational
Research and Training {NCERT) published its history
textbooks during the early 1970s, and these have remained
in use ever since among schools affiliated to the Central
Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). Apart from the
NCERT textbooks for Classes VIII, X and XII, (the classes
in which children study the freedom movement), I included
the textbooks published by the state boards of Uttar
Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Bengal and
Punjab. These, I thought, would suffice to represent the
range of regicnal variations one might find in the study of
the freedom struggle. I also included four privately published
textbooks which are used in schools affiliated to the Indian
Council of Secondary Education (!CSE). These schools
constitute a substantial section of elite 'public' schools, the
rest of which are affiliated to the CBSE.
I have taken pains to place my reading of Indian and
Pakistani textbooks in two kinds of frames. One is a
pedagogic frame, devised with the help of knowledge about
children's ways of perceiving the past and about the ethos
in which the systems of education function in India and
Pakistan. The other frame derives from the study of
narration as discourse. As a public narrative, all history can
be analysed in terms of the elements of discourse, namely,
the narrator, the listener and the story. 4 Such a scheme of
analysis suits history written specifically for the young
because it carries the burden of making adjustments to
their impressionability and limited awareness. When history
takes the form of a textbook, its author addresses a known,
implied reader and feels responsible for fulfilling the goals
of the system which has given him or her a captive
audience. 5 These dimensions of textbook writing help us
understand why the story of the freedom struggle takes the

specific forms it does in Ind;a and Pakistan. The textbooks
analysed here are read in the context of the educational
policies and pedagogical conventions of each country. I
have made an attempt to map this larger context of the
teaching of history with the help of socio-historical details
relevant to the study of education in India and Pakistan.
These methodological concerns and aspects of design
are discussed, along with some other broad issues, in the
initial part of the book, consisting of four short chapters.
It is true that these chapters delay the reader's entry into
the comparative analysis which forms the focus of this
book, but the delay is necessary in view of the complex
interplay of factors shaping the subject. Readers who jump
directly to the sixth chapter, where the main study starts,
will run the risk of not appreciating the anxieties and
motives which led me to undertake this project in the first
place. Also, such readers could mistakenly think that my
analysis is merely yet another attempt to uncover the
politics of history writing. One major objective of this
study is to examine the rival ideologies of nationalism into
which schools attempt to socialize the young. Another is
to probe the politics of history writing as a means to
understand the contribution that schooling makes to the
Indo-Pak conflict. Not just what is taught in the name of
history in a broad sense, but precisely how it is represented
in order to design the young mind is the focus. The
manner in which children absorb the key arguments used
in the design, and what can be done to reorient history
writing towards a peaceful future, are discussed in the third
part. In place of a conclusion, the final chapter indicates
the pedagogic planning needed for making the teaching of
-history an instrument of peace.
PART I
Challenge of the Past

2
Children and the Past
Long before children have the capacity, and find the

opportunities, to make sense of the past, they are socialized
into its many legacies. Dispensed as history, knowledge of
the past becomes a powerful factor of acculturation. Both
in its popular-oral as well as written-versions and the
authorized school version, knowledge of the past has a
pronounced impact on how great collectivities like nation-
states act in the historical present. Representations of the
past, dispersed by institutions like schools· and the state
media, ultimately serve as mental maps which guide large
multitudes of people in shaping their responses to present-
day situations. Assimilation of this knowledge during
childhood takes place through socialization at home and
formal learning at school. The first source contributes to
the formation of tacit understanding; the other leads to the
formation of socially articulated knowledge. Together, they
16 Challenge of the Past
shape attitudes, beliefs and behaviour during later life.

As a preface to the analysis of history texts used in
Indian and Pakistani schools, this chapter examines the
psycho-social characteristics of children's response to the
past. It draws upon theories concerning socialization and
learning in an effort to give the reader a general idea of the
cognitive challenge that the teaching of history at school
might present to children. We first take a look at the
socializing forces that work in early childhood, forming
the bedrock of collective attitudes which the school, when
it receives the child later, must see as a 'given'. In the next
section, we discuss the specific problems that arise, from
early adolescence onwards, in the context of learning about
the past under the auspices of history as a school subject.
Early Socialization
One can hardly conceptualize a culture which does not
store and transmit to the young, a collective memory.
Indeed, as Durkheim suggested, no culture can survive for
long without performing these tasks with vigour. 1 A good
deal of the collective memory is stored and transmitted to
the young as tacit knowledge, as a part of their early
upbringing or 'primary socialization'. In this form,
knowledge concerning the past is passed on to the young
in ways finely interwoven in everyday adult-child dialogue.
The other kinds include knowledge of ritual, language,
appropriate behaviour, and so on. Knowledge about the
past is also woven into rituals observed in the family and
community, as well as in language and modes of worship.
Tacit knowledge about the past of one's family and
community is not open to rational enquiry or questioning.
Indeed, there is no expectation of 'understanding' as such.
Children and the Past 17
As an inheritance, the past requires the young to submerge

themselves in it, in the sense that they would learn to
incorporate its categories in their own linguistic, emotional
and ethical behaviour. In this sense, the past can be aptly
likened to a body of water; whether one chooses to go into
its depth or not, the depth is there.
The past, as this metaphor might indicate, cannot be
broken up or classified into temporal categories, such as
the ones historians offer us for holding the past as articulate
knowledge. When the child is socialized into tacit knowledge
of the collective past, the effect leaves no possibility of
being reflected on or analysed. Far from being ordered or
organized into a calendar, the past is transmuted into a
bunch of salient events, pleasant as well as painful, woven
around images of places and personalities which are
necessarily larger than life. The events stored in this fashion
may well feature a random mix of religious mythology and
history, including pre-history. Great battles won and lost,
famines, migrations and celebrations are stored in this
indiscriminate stock of memory which the child inherits in
the course of socialization in the family. The means of
communication used by the family may include articulate
media like story-telling or conversations, but the residue
they form in the child's memory is necessarily a quietly
held stock of knowledge.
This stock of knowledge can be classified into two sets
of holdings; one consists of images, and the other of
attitudes and rules of behaviour. The images pertain to
events and personages or actors to which the child's social
milieu assigns significance. This broad characterization of
images would cover those which have their origins in
religious history, myth and the rituals of community life.
Thus, the image of a newborn baby being carried across a
river in spate or a spider protecting a cave may become a

part of the child's inherited memory as much as the image
of a queen riding a horse, dressed in a man's attire. Images
of this kind may be derived from stories told by parents or
other adults and may include the ones being projected
from a television screen. Subsequent additions to these
images may be made by community events involving a
display of icons in a street procession, drama or decorations
in a place of worship. When we say in an everyday sense
that these images are 'deep rooted', we mean that they are
the substance of the identity the child develops in the
course of his or her interaction with senior members of the
family who are part of a religio-cultural community.
The other part of the tacit stock of knowledge consists
of attitudes that the immediate and extended family and
the community regard as being appropriate. These attitudes
are necessarily grounded in the texture of relationships that
the community forms with groups it regards as the 'other'.
The chances of such attitudes acting as ground rules of
expected behaviour are particularly high in societies with a
multi-ethnic composition, allowing space for several pasts
to be held together in a complex pattern. This description
eminently suits Indian society with its multi-religious and
caste-based composition. To be socialized in such a society
involves precise notions of the 'other' whose memory
stock of images and appropriate· attitudes are distinctly
different. 2
The child's primary socialization, which occurs within
the structure of relationships forming the immediate family,
entails the birth of a notion of the self as a member of
society. This symbolic rebirth, as distinct from the physical
birth, is a complex and prolonged outcome of routine
interactions between the growing child and his or her
immediate others. Language, as a repository of shared

values, perceptions and ways of negotiating the daily world,
acts as a prime medium of this interaction. It also acts as
a highly dynamic distributor of common knowledge that
the adult society-of which the child's parents are
members-take for granted as its wisdom. The child receives
this knowledge without any possibility of interpreting or
questioning it. As Berger and Luckmann put it, 'although
the child is not simply passive in the process of his
socialization, it is the adults who set the rules of the game'. 3
The knowledge that the child receives in the course of
primary socialization includes role-related behaviours (e.g.,
behaviours considered appropriate for a boy or a girl) as
well as generalized behaviours. It also includes attitudes,
perceptions and values underlying behaviours deemed to
be appropriate.
The knowledge imparted by adults in the course of
their interaction with the child constructs a symbolic
reality which the child negotiates and lives in. This reality
is necessarily selective. Only the crucial or most salient
aspects of organized society are conveyed. Memory of the
social past is one such segment. It is conveyed, not as a
detailed record of events, but rather as a body of
recollections sedimented in the society's lore. Individual
adult memories are accommodated. in a common, shared
past, featuring a complex intermeshing of biography,
heritage, and myth. Long before children have the means
to reflect on reality in an interpretative manner, they are
socialized into a world that has a continuity infinitely
longer than their own lives. This infinite continuity has an
identity-giving power inasmuch as it answers the question,
'Where did I come from?' Since the upbringing of children
responds in a powerful, decisive manner to this question,
childhood can be said to have an all-embracing, immersion

role to play in the formation of personality.
By the time the child goes to school, she has already
acquired the basic, deeper imprint that membership of a
society, as an outcome of primary socialization, implies.
The school has no choice but to work with the child's
personality thus formed. The challenge for those involved
in the child's schooling as policy-makers, curriculum
designers, writers of textbooks and, of course, teachers lies
in enabling the child to extend the sociai.ized self in a
reasoned and coherent manner. In practical terms, it means
how best they can equip the child with the intellectual
wherewithal to consciously reflect on the socialized self
even as this self interacts with the objective world.
Learning At School
Modern national systems of education in most countries
may, in principle or on paper, be committed to developing
children's intellectual means but in practice, the education
imparted in schools rarely gives a child the opportunity
and the intellectual means to reflect on his or her socialized
self. Generally, these systems of education are oriented
towards cultivating the characteristics of loyal citizens in
children, in preference to the development of their
intellectual or contemplative capacities. As far as teaching
about the past is concerned, schools in different systems
perform the job of socializing the young into an approved
national past, the approving agency being the state. 4 As an
agency of secondary socialization-as distinguished from
primary socialization accomplished in the family-the school
uses the officially approved knowledge of the nation's past
to inspire and prepare children for fulfilling the roles
expected of them as obedient citizens. Depending on the

circumstances prevailing in a country, these roles may
range from acting as a law-abiding citizen in everyday life
to being prepared to fight for one's country in the event of
a war.
In order to look at the school's role more closely, we
need to make a distinction between the knowledge of past
events and the awareness that these events pertain to
specifiable phases of the past. In the first sense, knowledge
of the past is like any other information, in that it can be
held in memory without the concepts required to make
sense of it. Thus, a child of six may tell us that India won
its freedom from British rule on 15 August 1947, without
a grasp of what 'British rule' or freedom from it might
mean. The awareness that there is a past dimension to
present-day reality is quite different from the possession of
this kind of information. Also, the awareness that the past
is a body of time that can be measured and rationally
organized may not always accompany the knowledge of
past events.
Children may need at least some information about
past events in order to develop an awareness concerning
their pastness. This is because the past dimension of things
is not open to a child's exploratory instincts as are the
other dimensions, such as the physical or mechanical
properties and uses of things. Children can figure out how
an old clock works by peeping inside it, but they cannot
figure out by any means other than by being told that the
clock was bought by someone's grandfather when the
mother was eight years old. The past story of an object is
a matter of representation: children become aware of it in
the course of interaction, rather than by detecting it on
their own. In a rudimentary sense, there may be some
possibility of guessing and discovering it, for instance, by

noticing that an object looks old. That the appearance of
age conceals a full-scale story, so to say, is an awareness
that must await the opportunity of the child meeting
someone who knows that story and chooses to tell it. This
is why children depend on adults to learn that there is a
past, and also, to learn what it consisted of. Later on, they
may develop the ability, if they get the opportunity, to
explore the past themselves. 5
Piaget's theory concerning children's intellectual
development, and his general theory of knowledge, can
offer us valuable help in recognizing the challenges that
learning about the past presents to children. The broad
inferences we can draw from his work and from that of his
critics are relevant to the issues raised here. 6 Piaget's theory
tells us that children's ability to think logically develops in
the course of experiences they encounter or, rather, construct
in informal ways. Teaching has no direct role to play in
this process, except by way of extending the scope of the
child's experiences. The theory suggests that teaching this
or that subject depends for its success on our appreciation
of the logical framework that children apply in order to
reconstruct what we say or do in their own mental worlds.
Another point we can derive from Piaget's theory is that
development is a comprehensive phenomenon, which means
that the ability to think in increasingly logical ways has a
pervasive influence on the learning required in different
areas of the curriculum. We learn from Piaget how slow,
long and maturation-bound the development of logical
thinking remains throughout childhood and adolescence.
We are somewhat startled when we hear his claim about
young children's difficulties with problems requiring
transitive inferences, appreciation of invariance, reversibility
and simultaneity.7 These are some of the key attainments

marked out in Piaget's portrayal of the long and intrinsically-
driven journey that children undertake as they grow up.
These attainments are of crucial significance for children's
grasp of school knowledge, though terms like 'grasp' may
not mean the same thing to teachers of different subjects.
Ultimately, the child's intellectual development is aimed
towards the ability to deal with abstractions, freed from
the world of concrete objects and context-tied meanings.
Such a liberation of the child's mind occurs, according to
Piaget's theory, in adolescence, though at that time a
number of new quasi-emotional challenges face the
intellectually well-equipped child. It is towards the end of
adolescence that a young person develops a truly dependable
apparatus for constructing knowledge in logical ways.
Studies have shown that the advantage of, what Piaget
calls, 'formal' thinking that the adolescent may have in
school subjects like science and mathematics may accrue
much later-perhaps later than in all other subjects-in the
learning of history. 8
It is the content of our knowledge of the past that we
think of when we say that we know what the past was
like. However, as the distinction made a little earlier
shows, it is one thing to have some knowledge of what
might have happened in the past, quite another to know
that it happened in the past at a certain point of time and
under a given set of circumstances. The content of one's
knowledge of the past must be accompanied by an awareness
of time in order to qualify as historical knowledge. The
ability to grasp abstractions, the concept of probability,
and linguistic competence in reasoning are related to the
maturation of the sense of time. Children who have not
developed these abilities in any substantial sense may well
form an idea of past events and the persons involved in

them, but their idea cannot qualify as historical
understanding.
Among the criteria for defining historical understanding,
the foremost would surely be the awareness that an event
which occurred in the past requires us to appreciafe the
circumstances, values and choices that shaped the actions
of the people who were involved in it. Since a past event
cannot be re-enacted, we must imagine it, or rather
reconstruct it as best as we can, with whatever evidence we
may have access to. Usually, such evidence is limited, and
its adequacy as a basis for interpretation is subject to debate
among historians. Historical understanding demands that
as readers of history we appreciate such debates; which
means that we know why a past event permits those who
study it professionally only a limited degree of certitude in
describing or interpreting it. Thus, to make historical sense
of the past implies some understanding of the historian's
job. Without such an understanding, a reader of history
cannot be said to know how the study of the past differs
from the study of the present.9
Secondly, an understanding of history requires the
basic ability to make sense of a text which freely uses
concepts and ideas from other areas of social inquiry, such
as political science, sociology, and psychology. History
deals with society, with how it worked in older times; it
also deals with the succession of events which both marked
and c_aused changes in the way people lived then.
Understandably, historians use the terms of inquiry which
have a general value for the study of society, including the
study of present-day society. Along with a basic awareness
that an event occurred in times different from the present,
history demands from us the ability to notice the use of
common terms like 'order', 'rule', 'conflict' and 'power' in

the context of a specific set of circumstances which prevailed
in the past. A reader of history should be capable of
considerable flexibility in attributing a relevant meaning to
such terms.
Thirdly, a challenging psychological demand that
historical understanding makes from us is to notice an
event and the people involved in it, both in terms of its
outcome and, at the same time, without being completely
guided by the outcome. This idea is a bit paradoxical, so it
needs to be explained and illustrated. What impact an
event or a course of events has on subsequent times is of
great interest to historians. They. are, after all, concerned
with the succession of occurrences, not just in an occurrence
by itself. Yet, if historians looked at an event solely from
the point of view of its outcome,'· they can hardly
comprehend and appreciate the perspective and motivation
of the people who were involved in the event but who did
not know what the ultimate outcome of their actions
would be. A reasonable understanding of the causes that
impelled historicai personalities or the purpose they were
working for demand from us the ability to take their
perspective into account. This is different from feeling an
empathy which may, in fact, restrain historical
understanding or turn it into a vicarious experience of the
kind fiction provides. History demands "the capacity to
enter into a time-frame and perspective without being
submerged in it. 10
A useful example can be derived from the political
happenings of the years preceding India's Partition. The
Partition did eventually occur, and our awareness of this
fact colours our view of the leaders who were engaged in
the politics of pre-Partition days, either trying to avoid it
or trying to make it happen. To understand and to explain

historically why Partition took place requires that we are
able to see the happenings preceding it without imposing
on th{!m our knowledge of the fact that Partition did occur
and also our knowledge of the cost it incurred, not to
mention the cost that it continues to incur. No application
of this ability can be perfect; it cannot be, for there is no
way we can jettison our knowledge of Partition as an event
that took a terrible shape. However, the effort to construct
pre-Partition politics and other developments without being
influenced by our awareness of what eventually happened
is essential for a proper understanding of pre-Partition
history.
The representation of history at school as a long record
of the past may present to the young essentially the same
kind of cognitive challenges that they face in other areas of
the curriculum, but perhaps these challenges take a relatively
more complex form in history. As a subject at school,
history comes across as a record of salient events which
have a dual face. Each major event is presented as an
outcome of the ones preceding it and, at the same time,
constituting the cause or source of what followed it.
Appreciation of a chain of events implies that the student
is able to perceive· both aspects of an event. Such a
perception involves a fully developed capacity for what
Piaget calls reversibility. It consists of the ability to notice
the differences between two or more objects which are
similar in certain basic respects. Reversibility implies the
recognition that one can study the differences while holding
the similarities in mind as a point one can 'return' to.
Among the abilities discussed above. in the context of
historical understanding, a high degree of reversibility is
necessarily implied. For instance, it is implicit in the
requirement that as readers of history, we should not allow

our analysis and judgement to be coloured by our knowl~dge
of outcomes. Though one normally associates the
development of reversibility with the age-range covered by
the elementary school years, this association is rather
narrowly rooted in children's learning of mathematics.
Verbally represented problems involving human situations,
such as the ones confronted in the study of literature and
history, may require greater maturation and specifically
organized opportunities to be resolved with the help of
reversibility and other capacities linked to the development
of reasoning.
The development of historical understanding, in the
sense defined earlier, is a valid pedagogic aim for the
teaching of history although the school syllabi and textbooks
may not necessarily be organized with this aim in view. In
the comparative study of textbooks used in India and
Pakistan presented later, the foregoing discussion of
historical understanding will be used as a source of criteria
for commenting on texts from the child's point of view.
Let us conclude this discussion by reminding ourselves
what challenges the teaching of history at school may
present to children. There are two kinds of challenges, the
first of which arises from the knowledge of the past that
children acquire as part of their socialization at home. This
knowledge includes beliefs and attitudes inherited from the
past by communities and families. Some of the beliefs and
attitudes may come in conflict with the ones upheld by the
school, and the problems arising from this conflict may be
compounded by the school\ refusal to recognize the
knowledge of the past implicit in the child's socialization.
The second kind of challenges are related to the extent to
which the teaching of history at school attunes itself to the
child's cognitive capacity to make sense of history. If the

design of syllabi and the content of textbooks overlook the
developmental aspects of cognition, the consequences may
be graver than boredom with the subject or poor
performance in an examination. The teaching of history as
a vehicle for the dispersal of officially approved information
about the past can hardly qualify to be called a purely
educational enterprise.
3
Frames of Popular Perception
The history of the freedom struggle taught to school-

children in India and Pakistan is framed by a deep awareness .
of the 'other'. In both cases, the sense of what happened in
the past is intertwined with the current and evolving
perception of the 'other'. This applies to older history as
well, but is particularly true of the teaching of the freedom
struggle. Pakistan was born as a result of Partition which
accompanied the end. of the freedom struggle. On the other
hand, India's identity as a secular country has its foundation
in the resistance shown by India's greatest freedom fighters
to the idea of Partition. This difference may constitute a
sufficient reason for the pedagogic narratives of freedom in
both countries to be greatly influenced by perceptions of
the 'other', but there is another, equally strong reason.
This has to do with the fact that the concept of 'freedom'
is an unfinished or ongoing narrative in both countries, as
indeed it is m all once-colonized countries. The label,

'developing countries', which is commonly applied to
former colonies, is true in a literal sense in that their stories
of independence are still developing or unfolding.
The struggle against British imperial power continues
to be used as a source of inspiration for progress in both
India and Pakistan. Any number of examples can be given
to substantiate this. The two I found among advertisements
celebrating Independence Day a year ago should suffice. A
half-page advertisement in Indian newspape.-s showed four
similar looking icons from history. The first three showed
a soldier's helmet and a sword. The three swords were
somewhat different, each successive one looking a little
more advanced. The first figure represents the battle of
Plassey where Sirajuddaula fought the British in 1757 and
lost. The second represents the fourth Mysore war, marking
the defeat of Tipu Sultan, and the third represents Rani
Lakshmi Bai's defeat in 1857. The fourth icon shows a
helmet with a rifle, and the caption says: 'Today, defeats
are history.' This advertisement of the Indian Ordnance
Factory carries the following message at the bottom:
Losing our independence to the British was a sad
chapter in our country's history. And regaining it
wasn't easy. All the more reason why we are
determined to guard it zealously. And why we
make sure the arms and ammunition that we
manufacture in our Ordnance Factories are fail-safe
and dependable. So that, history never repeats
itself.
By placing India's defence preparedness today in the
historical context of the British conquest, the advertisement
semiotically extends the story of the freedom struggle. It
Frames of Popular Perception 31
does so unobtrusively, by means of careful graphic crafting.

The newspaper reader, who is the intended viewer of the
advertisement, may not notice what is happening. Beneath
the general point about the consistent growth of India's
military might lurks the message that present-day conflict
with neighbours is similar to the threat that European
colonizers once posed to India's freedom.
Independence Day advertisements in a popular Pakistani
news monthly provide parallel examples of the psychological
continuation of the freedom struggle. The character and
the precise content of these advertisements are different,
but the message is similar to the one in the Indian
advertisement. For instance, an advertisement in 1be Herald,
(August 2000) of NADRA, 1 an agency of. the Ministry of
Interior involved in documenting Pakistan's population,
says that it is 'implementing the highest ideal'. Below this
claim is set a photograph of Jinnah and his 14 August 1948
message:
Pakistan's honour, defence and survival lay in its
ability to stay united and integrated. You have
only one goal to pursue-to be united and coherent
as a nation on every front.
Another advertisement in the same issue of the magazine,
given by a cement company, says:
Quaid-e-Azam had a dream for the Muslims of the
sub-continent. Our aim is to build a stronger
Pakistan in the global community.
Thus, the Pakistan Movement continues to provide not
just an inspiration but also the content of the text of
progress.
The use of Jinnah's or, in the case of India, Gandhi's
image as a reminder of the unfinished business of the

freedom movement is part of a wider tendency which we
see in both countries. They are treated as reminders not
just of history, but of a project that started with the
freedom movement. This nation-building project has very
different connotations in the two countries. The difference
arises partly out of the intrinsic associations that the
historical memory of the freedom struggle has in each
society. The other source of the difference is the use made
of the perception of the 'other' in the continued story of
the freedom struggle. Later, we will examine the
representation of the freedom struggle in Indian and
Pakistani school textbooks in comparative detail. That
discussion will naturally focus on the ways in which the
nation-building ideology of each country shapes its story of
the past. At present, I wish to focus on the interlocked
frames of perception that are used in India and Pakistan to
refer to their own national identity by hinting at the
'other'. I find it necessary to present this discussion as a
background to my main study because the details of
textbook history make so much more sense when seen in
the light of ongoing identity-building processes. In any
case, history written for children cannot be isolated from
these contemporary frames, because teaching the young by
itself symbolizes the nation-building process.
In any relationship characterized by conflict, each side
tends to define the other in sharp contrast to itself. This is
quite true of the Indo-Pak relationship, except that the
internal complexities of the two societies do not fully
permit us to refer to them as two distinct 'sides' involved
in a conflict. Each side has something of the other in it.
There are many contexts internal to the two countries
which influence their perception of the 'other', allowing it
either a strongly hostile or a weakly friendly articulation

under different political and cultural climates. For India,
the presence of a large Muslim population-larger than
Pakistan itself-serves a dual symbolic role. As evidence of
India's pluralism, it 'proves' that the creation of Pakistan
was superfluous. In contrast to this hostile discourse, a
friendly discourse uses the Muslim population as a cultural,
even diplomatic bridge-for example, in the context of the
introduction of a daily bus service between Delhi and
Lahore-to Pakistan. In Pakistan, no effort is spared to
highlight India's 'foreignness' in terms of religion and
culture. Yet, almost a daily need is felt to talk about Indian
cities from where one's ancestors came, where relatives still
live, and where some of the greatest monuments of Islamic
glory are to be found.
Thus, each country presents a strong case of dependence
on the other for defining itself. There is a widespread
feeling in India that such a tendency is exclusive to Pakistan,
given the fact that Pakistan has had to invent a national
identity, not once but twice-once, after birth, and then
again following the emergence of Bangladesh as a separate
country. By comparison, identity-building appears to have
been a relatively smoother process for India, despite
problems arising out of its size and the hardships involved
in democratic governance. The argument that India finds
in Pakistan a resource for defining itself may, therefore,
sound nonsensical. There are differences in the manner in
which the two countries use each other to define themselves,
and their need to do so may be of a different order, but in
the following pages I wish to argue that both use the other.
To probe this highly complex theme, we can start by
differentiating between the official self-perception of the
two countries and popular perceptions. The latter expectedly
vary greatly, depending on the region, the generation and

the background of the people concerned. The following
discussion of popular Indian perceptions is based on my
experience as a teacher of university students and an
observer of school-children. One of my major, annually
repeated, experiences has to do with the difficulty that the
concept of secularism presents to students. Inevitably, the
concept of secularism comes in for aggressive questioning
year after year. The official significance attached to it is
subjected to serious doubt; indeed, the policy is accused of
lack of sincerity, not just sense. It is viewed with suspicion,
as 'politics'. And this view is not confined to a fringe
element in the student body I face.
The time-frame and the circumstances in which this
view has been articulated need some clarification. Secularism
was included as a topic in the syllabus of educational
philosophy in my institute in the late 1980s. By then, the
proverbial middle-of-the-road politics of the Congress had
started curving rightward, even as the traditional right was
preparing the popular imagination for radical measures
against official secularism. The rise of religio-terrorism in
Punjab served as a grim backdrop against which civil
society witnessed the state's speedy accommodation of the
voices of religious revivalism. Hindu communalism not
only gathered momentum and aggressiveness, but also
respectability. The Ramjanmabhoomi movement provided
an impetus to these trends, ultimately leading to the
outbreak of widespread communal violence at the end of
1992. During the remaining years of the 1990s, the erosion
of secular institutions continued even as educational policy
came under strong pressure to accommodate the ideology
of religious revivalism. This thumb-nail sketch of the last
two decades should suffice as a basis for the point that
many of the students whom I taught during this period

were negotiating a substantial transformation of the Indian
state and the urban social ethos. The questions they raised
on the official policy of secularism often reflected the
debates featured in the press and on television.
A remarkable and frequent line of questioning pursued
by my students wonders that if Pakistan is an Islamic state,
how can India be a secular state? The logic of this question
is purely arithmetical, namely, if Muslims broke India in
1947 to establish their own nation, surely what was left
must be a primarily Hindu country. This neat conclusion
does not allow the presence of a substantial Muslim
population in India to be used as a sufficient reason for
reconsideration. The point that India is a pluralist society,
structurally in favour of religio-cultural diversity, finds
appreciation only among a limited few of my university-
level students. Many instinctively refer to Pakistan, saying
that if India were truly pluralist, there would be no need
for Pakistan. This fundamental position enables them to
ask why India cannot be described as a country of the
Hindus when Pakistan openly calls itself a home of the
Muslims. Thus, they come back to the origin,1 doubt-that
secularism is a rhetorical device to win a political game.
The name of the game, they say, is 'vote banks'.
Undoubtedly, this kind of argument is partly a reflection
of the general cynicism that educated youth feel towards
politicians. The institution of eiections has been seriously
discredited in the eyes of the educated youth. Though
disenchantment with politics is articulated in sharper terms
by those who have attended English-medium schools, it is
a general phenomenon. Young people use their awareness
of 'vote banks' to debunk the value-foundations of the
state, including secularism. Such extended use of the 'vote
banks' theory has other implications as well. Just as the

vote bank of the Muslim minority requires the policy of
secularism to cover it, the vote bank of the lower-caste
population requires the high-sounding policy of social
justice to hide it-so goes a popular argument. Indeed, one
may well wonder which state policy the educated youth of
the urban middle class detest more-secularism or
reservation? To a certain extent, such sweeping questioning
of fundamental state values may be a reflection of the
generally conservative environment of urban middle-class
homes. One can also accept that uncertainties related to
career and income have contributed substantially to the
negative attitude of urban educated youth, the majority of
whom come from upper-caste backgrounds. However, their
response to secularism is a more complex issue. An argument
which I will discuss now shows that we ought to see the
questioning of secularism by the young as part of a deeper
cultural phenomenon, related to the concept of India's
freedom.
The argument is that Independence in 1947 meant an
end to all kinds of foreign rule, not just British rule;
therefore, India is now free to be Hindu. On the surface,
this argument does not use Partition or Pakistan to justify
a Hindu identity for India as opposed to a secular identity,
but if we consider it carefully, we find that the argument
upholds India as a Hindu country on the ground that India
has a long pre-Muslim heritage. Before we probe the
argument any further, let us remind ourselves that we are
probing a position taken by college-educated youth, not
necessarily indoctrinated by Hindu revivalist organizations
associated with the so-called 'Sangh Parivar'. Of course, I
cannot rule out the possibility that some of the youth
whose views I have had the opportunity to know first-
hand were exposed in some manner to the views propagated

through different media by Hindu revivalist organizations.
That may be so, but the kind of arguments that liberal-
minded analysts have been accustomed to labelling as the
discourse of Hindu communalism is, in fact, a far more
widespread one. It extends not merely to young people
whose ideological inclinations are not yet fully formed, but
also to members and leaders of the very parties regarded as
being committed to India's pluralist ideal. The point is not,
of course, new: a communal lobby always existed within
the Congress, encircling its progressive outlook with
conservative demands. As a passionate supporter of one
such demand, voiced in the context of the Somnath temple
soon after Independence, K.M. Munshi, Union minister of
food and agriculture in the early 1950s, wrote that the
national urge for Somnath's resurrection was reflected
'when Sardar (Patel), with uncanny insight, saw that we
would never genuinely feel that freedom had come, nor
develop faith in our future, unless Somnath was restored'. 2
The idea of freedom which Munshi was articulating is
anchored in the perception of the medieval ages as a period
of India's enslavement by Islam. Progressive historiography
has made a valiant effort to disaggregate the notion of a
cohesive or monolithic medieval period, but the notion
persists. To a certain extent, it draws sustenance from a
general unwillingness to engage with what· Satish Saberwal
calls the 'medieval encounter'. Criticizing the denial of
categories like Hindu and Muslim, Saberwal emphasizes
the need to study relations between the two in the context
of the growth of the social framework, particularly the
expansion of metropolitan centres, during the nineteenth
century. Suggesting a range of sources for enquiry, he says
that the rise of communalism during the colonial period
should perhaps be seen in relation to the long-standing

separativeness of religious networks, the acute social distance
expressing a high level of social antagonism between
Muslims and Hindus, the lapse of formerly functioning,
integrative political and administrative ties, and the growth
of communally homogeneous neighbourhoods in the new
metropolitan centres. 3 He suggests that these separative
social and religious patterns of life found a place in 'primary
socialization' - i.e. norms of upbringing in early childhood-
and by that route, they gained entry into the social
unconscious. Sudhir Kakar makes a similar point when he
describes cases of Hindu patients allegedly possessed by a
Muslim bhuta. The incidence of such cases, Kakar says,
shows that 'the Muslim seems to be the symbolic,
representation of the alien in the Hindu unconscious'. 4
Saberwal and Kakar are talking about a perceptual
reality to which the discourse of secularism has done its
best to stay indifferent. The policy of indifference may
have had its advantages too, but it has allowed both Hindu
and Muslim versions of cultural separation to stay in
business. With reference to Pakistan, the secular voice has
remained quite feeble and indistinct from its critics, for
both, the word 'Pakistan' continues to carry a disruptive
connotation, succinctly exemplified in the title of a recent
novel by the renowned progressive Hindi novelist,
Kamleshwar: 'Kitney Pakistan?'-'How many Pakistans?'
This deeply negative symbolic meaning of 'Pakistan' is
commonly reflected in the parlance of college-going youth
regarding the present-day Indo-Pak relationship. It also
frequently spills into their critique of secularism. They
inevitably refer to either Pakistan or to Muslims in any
discussion of India's national identity. Any reference. to
Pakistan or Muslims impels them to take a position close
to, if not identical with, the Hindu revivalist critique of

secularism. It means little to them if we suggest that the
choices Pakistan has made in order to become a certain
kind of nation should not matter to us, or that India has
every freedom to define itself the way it likes. Such a
suggestion is countered with the question I have already
mentioned, i.e. why was Pakistan required at all if India
was a pluralist society and was going to remain one. The
fact that India was divided on religious grounds serves as a
hard historical fact in this debate. It is applied in various
ways at different points. For instance, in a discussion held
in an English-medium public school on whether state funds
should be used to preserve Ghalib's haveli, those against it
said that the haveli would have qualified for state funds if
it were in Lahore.
It appears from such debates that many students today
find something extremely puzzling in the historical
preference exercised b.y Indian nationalist leaders in favour
of a secular policy. Some of their difficulties can be
attributed to the inadequacies of the education system. The
absence of opportunities to freely discuss sensitive issues
like communal hostility is quite obvious. Poor organization
of knowledge in the history syllabus and texts is also a
relevant problem; this book will provide ample proof of
that. These and other familiar weaknesses of the educational
system contribute to the hardening of the negative mindset
which has its foundation in the character of the relationship
that India and Pakistan have established between themselves
as two nation states. They have chosen to stay interlocked
in a web of unresolved instincts, memories and images.
Images and words commonly used in the media, both
in the press and television, corroborate this observation.
'Threat from within' has been a favourite theme of Bombay
cinema for a long time. It has been a staple item in

numerous films where a character conspires against India's
national interests by collaborating with India's enemies. 5 In
several recent films this old theme of conspiracy has been
used with pointed references to Pakistan. Filled with scenes
of violence, these films have been watched as credible
representations of militancy supported by Pakistan in
Kashmir. Discussions on radio and letters to newspaper
editors tirelessly reinforce the popular theory that Pakistan
wants to dismember India. The handy logic upholding the
theory is that Pakistan wants to avenge its own
dismemberment which occurred in 1971 as a result of
India's intervention. The somewhat deeper logic sustaining
the theory of Pakistan's evil design is based on Partition.
According to this, the Muslims have already dismembered
India once, and will not mind doing so again.
Let us now move over to the Pakistani side of this
symbolic battle. When I started this study, I believed as
many Indians do that there may not be much difference
between the official and the popular self-images of Pakistan.
The word 'Pakistan' conveyed to me both its state and its
people, and therefore the common media reports with
sentences starting with 'Pakistan has intensified its anti-
India propaganda', carried for me a flat, undifferentiated
meaning. Constructing a human face of Pakistan proved a
major epistemic challenge for ·my preparation for this
study. Exposure to Pakistan's domestic debates since
Independence and its literature, particularly fiction, gave
valuable help. Perhaps more than any other literary work,
Mumtaz Shah Nawaz's The Heart Divided, prepared me to
recognize that there was a Pakistani view we Indians may
not have the epistemic means to fathom. 6 Written before
Partition, this book draws the political contours of a
widening gap between Hindus and Muslims of northern

India during the 1930s. The artless brilliance of the young
writer, who died soon after Partition, compels us to question
the knowledge of pre-Partition India we find in history
books. Also, we have been used to seeing history mainly
from the male point of view. This book dwells mainly on
the lives of women, particularly young women. It enables
us to view the late 1930s-a period of rapid and significant
political changes-in the everyday setting of a politicized
Muslim family with three daughters.
An opportunity to organize my academic and literary
preparation around a real-life experience came my way
during a visit to Lahore which I have mentioned in the
Introduction. In this brief and probably quite
unrepresentative exposure to life in Pakistan, I was able to
converse with several people involved in education, and in
two instances I spoke to school and college students.7 This
experience served as a precious supplement to the academic
preparation I had made for this study by reading extensively
on Pakistan's politics, economy and society. 8 I am aware
that for a country as big and varied as Pakistan, a single
personal exposure cannot be regarded as a sufficient basis
for talking about people's perceptions. Indeed, no amount
of exposure would have given me ideas and experiences
comparable to what I have used in the preceding pages for
discussing the perceptions of my young Indian students
about India. Given the conditions and the nature of the
problem between the two countries, I had to be content
with whatever little I could gather of how young Pakistanis
and others feel about their country. Of course, I had access
to some documentary sources too, such as magazines
available in Delhi's libraries and discussions on television.
However, my direct knowledge of the way Pakistan's
youngsters think remained quite limited.

India is a looming presence in their minds, and it
arouses a remarkable range of feelings, among which a
sense of threat and insecurity are paramount. Pakistan,
with all its turmoil and visible violence, comes across in
children's perception as a protected ground under grave
peril. Young students in Pakistan have no direct memory
of Partition, and the memories they are given in the course
of their education and upbringing are sketchy and remote.
It would be correct to say that education has succeeded in
dissociating Partition from its painful, violent reality, and
has turned it into an achievement for all Pakistanis as,
indeed, it was for Jinnah. Maybe it is different in provinces
other than Punjab, which has vivid memories of Partition,
but -we should not underestimate the capacity that modern
systems of education-especially when they are highly
centralized-have of dispersing knowledge. It is to this
dispersal effect of education that I attribute the high
awareness of Pakistan's rural poverty and other economic
problems which I found among Lahore's young people.
Young Pakistanis also seem acutely aware of their country's
difficulties as an economically and militarily weaker
neighbour of India. The capacity India has to overpower
Pakistan seems to have for them a meaning far more vivid
and physical than military or financial statistics can ever
have. That India does not accept· Pakistan's existence and
that Pakistan poses no real challenge for India are two sides
of the same emotion. It is an emotion that arouses insecurity
and impulsively justifies any degree of preparedness.
India's nuclear blasts of May 1998 were answered by
Pakistan's blasts the same month. This 'exchange' of blasts
was referred to by the students I met as evidence that India
wanted to finish Pakistan and that Pakistan was prepared
for survival. One of the arguments used for justifying the

Pakistani response was that Islam advises Man to acquire
the same power that an enemy might possess. A common
script underlying many commentaries made in the press on
the nuclear 'exchange' was that Pakistan had to be prepared
for any eventuality because India had never accepted
Pakistan. A reference to Kashmir was made by some of my
respondents who said that India had 'cheated' Pakistan on
Kashmir in 1947. If Kashmir's population is mainly Muslim,
why should it not belong to Pakistan, they asked, applying
the logic which had formed the basis of Partition. They
seemed puzzled to hear the question my Muslim colleague
travelling with me asked: 'What about the rest of the
Muslims in India? Why don't you want them too?'
India's military might, especially India's nuclear capacity,
is perceived in Pakistan as being obviously meant for use
against Pakistan. Although India does not receive a.U that
much space in the Pakistani press, it casts a substantial
shadow on the public space. Since the early 1970s, a
conscious effort seems to have been made, both by successive
governments and the intelligentsia, to displace India from
the inner chamber of Pakistan's self-awareness. 9 This effort
has resulted in a perceptible decline in publicly available
knowledge about India, though interest has remained high.
Pakistan's post-1971 policy of attaching itself to West Asia,
as opposed to South Asia, has had mixed success. ·In
economy, it has made an impact, but in international
relations, it has seldom proved to be more than a posture.
What has been more successful in nudging Pakistan's daily
awareness away from India is the density of the global
network its emigrant citizenry has formed. The
westernization of Pakistan's elite is just as glaring and
pervasive as that of their Indian counterparts. However,
vaster economic inequality and the absence of a stable

democratic machinery enable the Pakistani elite to live a
life of greater insulated splendour than their Indian
counterparts. Children of the elite have reason to feel
greater connectedness with the US and Europe than with
India, the land of their ancestral ties. 'Islamization' has
made little difference to them. Children who attend
government schools, and who receive a far bigger and
stiffer dose of religio-nationalist indoctrination, apparently
live in a different world.·
National self-awareness in Pakistan has proved to be a
highly volatile issue over the half century of its existence.
The self-confidence and determination of the early years
are seldom in evidence now, except perhaps in
advertisements. One looks in vain at the news media or
literature to find an articulation of a state of well-being.
What one finds instead is a persistently bleak commentary
on material and political conditions. The state of Pakistan's
national economy, the frequent disruptions in democratic
governance, and incidence of sectarian and other forms of
violence are among the prominent factors contributing to
the depressive mood one notices in the English press. 10
Depression is also a response to the general uncertainty of
civic life and fluctuations in the economy. In the recent
past, Pakistan's urban middle class has suffered a sizeable
loss of income and decline in its standard of living after the
end of the US-backed project to use Pakistan as a conduit
for countering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Although both India and Pakisqm use the theme of
freedom and national defence as a means of political
socialization of the young into a patriotic frame of mind,
the effort is made more explicitly and intensively in Pakistan.
Pakistani textbooks are replete with references to the 1965
and 1971 wars with India. In India, these wars have been
the theme of a number of blockbuster films, but we rarely
find stories related to them in textbooks. Pakistani school
textbooks, on the contrary, use these wars to construct
precise knowledge and imagery of battles and heroes. The
same applies to war memorial days. For some years now,
India has been celebrating 16 December as Vijay Diwas
(Victory Day) to commemorate the surrender of the
Pakistani army in what is now Bangladesh. The celebration
is confined to state advertisements in the press and public
functions staged by the armed forces. In Pakistan, on the
other hand, the celebration of 6 September as Defence
Day-in memory of the 1965 war-has a larger appeal. In
an, editorial comment on the importance of 6 September,
Young Nation, a youth supplement published by the liberal
Friday Times of Lahore, wrote:
It tells an epic tale of our soldiers who being a very
small number compared to the Indian and having
very little ammunition, weapons and machinery,
fought with such spirit, bravery and courage that it
stunned the Indian forces, and of the unity of our
people whose only goal was to protect Pakistan.
In the same issue, the magazine carried a small sample of
its young readers' views on Defence Day. A nine-year-old
wrote that it has a very significant meaning for all of
Pakistan:
It is also very special to me because this is a war
that we won for the freedom of our country.
A twenty-year-old youth wrote that the day 'conjures up
images of bravery, faith and spirit of fighting'. It would be
hard to come by this kind of impassioned writing by
school kids or college youth even in institutional magazines,

let alone in the mainstream English or Hindi press in India.
Pakistan's preoccupation with India has historical roots,
and to that extent it is reciprocated by India. But it is also
a reflection of the militarization of Pakistan's civic life and
economy. India too has a military-industrial complex, and
its recent growth has made some contribution to the
dearth of dissent on issues like defence expenditure; but in
the case of Pakistan, the military is embedded in civic
administration, hence its perceptions and needs affect
people's everyday reality in a pervasive manner. Pakistani
journalist Khaled .AhmP-d makes the point that the Indo-
Pak conflict has become a site of common vested interests
which use the media to divert public attention from
domestic crises. 'In Pakistan too', he says, 'it costs the state
machinery a lot of effort to divert popular attention to
India as the enemy state.' 11
Looking towards Indian perceptions in these contexts,
it seems we have great difficulty regarding Pakistan as
another ·•developing' or Third World country. Its
involvement in Kashmir, as an active supporter of terrorist
activity, has overshadowed all other impressions, which
were few to begin with. A coarse, almost sordid image of
day-to-day reality in Pakistan is widespread in India. It has
two ostensible sources: television coverage which exclusively
uses crass, often violent, imagery: artd a negative stereotype
of Muslim life which represents it as messy, poor and cruel.
The failure of democracy is yet another contributor to
Pakistan's negative image. Even highly educated, liberal-
minded Indians regard Pakistani society as basically an
army looking for a country. The intellectual, aesthetic and
cultural aspects of life in Pakistan are not widely known,
barring a few names, and even travellers' tales are rare.
Most important, the perception that Pakistan was not a

genuine product of historical processes, but an aberration
caused partly by artificially heightened personal fury and
partly as m imperialist conspiracy, obviates the need to
take it seriously as an independent society. 12
Reciprocal darkness regarding India in the Pakistani
mind is no less pervasive and deep. There are no India-
study centres in Pakistan. Private channels of Indian
television make what little difference they can, but Pakistan's
instincts towards India seem to be derived mainly from
pre-Partition memory, and the same is true of the knowledge
of Pakistan one generally finds in India. There are better-
informed, liberal-minded individuals on both sides of the
border. They perform a complex role in shaping mutual
perceptions. Liberal voices in India try to soften the
stereotype images of Pakistan by talking or writing about
the everyday reality of life and society they gather during
their visits to Pakistan or when they, in turn, are visited by
Pakistani friends. They also soften the harsh image of
Pakistan as a country of religious fanatics by commenting
on the rise of religious fanaticism in India. Their secular
credentials permit them to maintain a certain degree of
impartiality with regard to the hostile relationship of the
two countries. It seems that when they visit Pakistan, they
are received well but are perceived as strange and rather
inconvenient emissaries of an enemy country. Their
counterparts, namely the liberal-minded Pakistanis, have a
similar problem. In Pakistan, they sustain a shrinking
intellectual space available for dissent, but when they visit
India and talk about the grim reality_ of Pakistan, many of
them eagerly cater to the common Indian urge to receive
a hopelessly negative picture of Pakistan. The open ethos
of India encourages and pushes them to paint Pakistan's
already harsh political reality in lurid colours. Like the

Indian liberals, suspected of not representing real Indian
feelings because they come across as being remarkably
unprejudiced and friendly towards Pakistan, the Pakistani
liberals too are suspected of not being true representatives
because they are so fiercely critical of their own country.
4
Ideology and Textbooks
Educational activity of any kind depends on a text,

visible or invisible. In post-colonial societies like India and
Pakistan, school teaching uses highly visible texts which
carry the status of 'prescribed' texts. The status these texts
have, and the manner in which they are used, are rooted
in the system of education-its history and its relationship
with the larger socio-political milieu. The texts used for the
teaching of history are particularly sensitive to contemporary
politics and culture, for the reason that the writing of
history inevitably constitutes a response to the present. As
Hobsbawm says, we depend on the 'mercy of time' to get
a better view of what we are going through at present. 1
The past also provides a resource for legitimizing the
present, and this role has special importance for the historian
who writes for young, school-going children. How
knowledge about the past is selected, reconstructed and
so Challenge of the Past
represented in textbooks written for school-children assumes

great significance for a study like the present one which
intends to probe how a common past acquires distinct
versions under two systems of education. Our probe requires
a recall of the debates and controversies that have influenced
the teaching of history in the two countries. The records
of these debates-and they are far from over-have the
potential to give us valuable insights into the relationship
between national ideology and textbooks.
Secular vs Communal
Changes introduced in the curricular policy in India in the
early phase of post-independence planning have remained
in effect, despite a substantial controversy that flared up in
the late 1970s. It is only now that the or;entation of
entrenched curriculum policy is facing a real threat. The
evolution of curriculum and textbook policy in history has
had as much to do with the politics of education as with
the state's cultural policy. As far as the state's education
policy is concerned, its modernist orientation was articulated
quite forcefully in the Secondary Education Commission
which wrote its report during the early 1950s. It emphasized
the need to relate the teaching of all school subjects to the
psychological needs of children and their everyday world.
The commission endorsed the teaching of history, geography
and civics under the auspices of an encompassing social
studies approach.
The creation of the NCERT in the early 1960s was,
undoubtedly, aimed at strengthening the modernist
orientation of curriculum policy but 'national development'
had by now surfaced as an overarching theme of
modernization, and it had begun to convey a specific
Ideology and Textbooks 51
Indian connotation. The Kothari Commission report,

written in the mid-1960s, articulated a position in which a
national perspective was assumed to be synonymous with
a modern perspective. In comparison to the Secondary
Education Commission, the new commission displayed
greater willingness to turn nation-building into an ideology
and to see education as the prime instrument of propagating
lt.
Heuristic methodologies of teaching, emphasizing the
child's freedom to negotiate knowledge, were no more
centre-stage. Even manual work-proposed by Gandhi and
supported by early Plan documents-was now perceived as
being subservient to the general reorganization of academic
learning around the theme of 'nation-building'. The ideology
of national development, which the term 'nation-building'
symbolized, now served as a framework within which
economic, socio-cultural and educational aims could be
defined. Understandably, a young nation-state which had
fought two wars in a span of four years and was undergoing
a period of political uncertainty was less patient than
before with the ideal of a child's freedom to reconstruct
knowledge in the context of a local ethos. 2
The voluminous report of the Kothari Commission set
the agenda for a state which was under pressure to reorganize
and assert its role in education. Publication of textbooks
under the auspices of state-run bodies gained approval in
this phase, and the responsibility to produce model
textbooks fell upon the NCERT. The circumstances shaping
the publication of NCERT's history textbooks were
somewhat fortuitous, though they appear consistent with
the leftward tilt of Indira Gandhi's early years as prime
minister. The opportunity to write these textbooks had
arisen under M.C. Chagla (minister of education from
1963-1966) as a result of the initiative taken by a group of

young historians, among whom was Romila Thapar. She
recalls how the NCERT's history series was not really
born out of a policy decision, but rather out of an initiative
for which the ethos was just right:
If I may be autobiographical, in the early sixties
some of us did a survey of the textbooks that were
used in the schools of Delhi. We were appalled at
how bad they were. We wrote a ver/ passionate
letter to the then education minister M.C. Chagla
and said that something should be done to change
this, at least start from the textbooks. Chagla
promptly wrote back that since we were so
concerned and we were a bunch of historians, we
should write the new textbooks. 3
Some of the historians who wrote the NCERT's history
series during the late 1960s and the early 1970s were front-
line scholars whose methodology and findings had exercised
a profound influence on the substance and quality of
Indian historiography. In their school textbooks, however,
they displayed surprisingly limited awareness of the need
to disseminate the gains of their own professional labour
through imaginative pedagogy. These textbooks were
undoubtedly far superior to the ones in use at the time,
marking a significant departure in perspective and content,
but in terms of style and the ability to communicate with
children, they were not particularly distinguishable from
earlier texts.
During the post-Emergency Janata regime of the late
1970s, the NCERT textbooks came under attack from
within the government. The issues raised by the critics
were far from new; they had been part of a key debate in
Indian historiography, but now they were used for

mounting an ideological assault on curriculum policy in
history. In their study of this controversy, Rudolph and
Rudolph have identified its principal cause as the Janata
Party's 'inability to resolve its orientation towards the
meaning and practice of secularism and its perceived
opposite, communalism'. 4 In retrospect, we can easily view
this controversy in relation to the deeper tensions which,
for nearly three decades since Independence, had remained
hidden under the aura of a strong federal leadership.
Matters as fundamental as the idea of India, and the
definition of Indian identity were at stake, and the arguments
had been in political circulation for at least sixty years, if
not more. As a value-position, secularism had represented
a contested political space since the early 1920s; in the late
1970s, the contest was showing signs of getting keener.
The NCERT was able to turn a blind eye to this
controversy for another two decades, but the choices
available at the provincial level were already quite varied.
In several states, school textbooks had proved to be more
accommodating of the political configurations associated
with the Hindu revivalist ideology. Also, the chain of
schools directly linked to this ideology had become quite
long. 5 The main users of the NCERT textbooks were
English-medium public schools and the elite layer of state-
run schools, whose studem_s were mainly the children of
Central government employees. Some of the Congress-
ruled states had adapted the NCERT texts for middle
schools, leaving the senior students of history to choose
from among the privately published books.
Although the political orientation of the NCERT
series was modernist and progressive, its pedagogic character
was quite conventional. The authors were committed to
the teaching of history as a means of promoting rational

thinking, but their own style and approach provided little
room for children to participate in historical analysis and
judgement. The controversy surrounding this series had
mainly to do with the part covering medieval India, and
the main charge was that the texts were not sufficiently
hard on Muslim rulers of the period. Neither the authors
nor the critics seemed much bothered about the strategies
used in the texts for communicating with young readers. 6
This was perhaps one reason why the part which covered
the freedom struggle, especially its concluding phase,
received so little attention. The treatment given to the
freedom struggle represented a stance which had
inadvertently achieved the status of an ideological consensus
between the right and the Left. The consensus could be
seen at its sharpest over the symbolic value of India's
Partition.
For both the secular-minded Left and the Hindu
revivalists, the Partition represented an event that had
injured the idea of India. From the secular perspective,
Partition was a blow to the pluralist character of Indian
society and its composite culture. The opponents of secular
historians also saw Partition as a big blow-to the continuity
and territorial integrity of the Hindu civilization-engineered
by Muslims whose ancestry was said to lie among medieval
invaders. British manipulation to ensure India's division
was a prominent component of both interpretations of
Partition. So long as the text did not encourage children to
think about the nature of the injury that Partition had
caused, rival interpretations would stay buried. The NCERT
texts fulfilled this condition as happily as any other school
book written on the freedom struggle, because none of
them were designed to make children think.
Uses of Religion
The secular-communal duality that we find at the bottom
of Indian debates on curriculum and textbook policy in
history have a parallel in the difficulties that Pakistan has
faced in constructing a convincing national self-identity.
Indeed, the issue of identity has been acknowledged by
many commentators on Pakistan's politics as a chronic
source of crisis. 7 It is true that many 'new' nation-states
formed out of anti-colonial struggles faced the challenge of
defining themselves, but Pakistan faced a deeper, existential
challenge because of the nature of the specific struggle that
brought it into being.
The political processes that culminated in the Partition
of India and the creation of a sovereign 'homeland' for
Muslims had deep and tangled psychological underpinnings.
These can be spotted both in the political and administrative
history of the Indian subcontinent as well as in the shaping
of inter-community relationships since the latter half of the
nineteenth century, the period coterminous with the
maturation of colonial rule. A vast but compartmentalized
body of literature exists on these processes. It is
compartmentalized both in terms of the country of its
origin and the genre or discipline in which its components
have been produced. Studies of Partition and reflections on
it constitute a huge storehouse if we include Indian and
Pakistani works in history, politics, biography, literature
and journalism. Modest attempts have been made recently
to make sense of rival perspectives, but we are quite far
from reaching the point where a student might have access
to sufficient material for developing a holistic view of
Partition. 8 When we discuss education in Pakistan in the
context of the present study, we are necessarily handicapped
by the absence of an integrated understanding.
Anyone taking even a cursory look at the organization

of curriculum in Pakistan today will notice how central a
place the urge to define and construct the idea of Pakistan
occupies in the system. This impulse finds an expression
rather more powerful than what the customary mention of
national identity might suggest in an official document of
education policy. In the case of Pakistan, the concern for
national identity takes the form of an inspired mission,
which, to an outsider, might appear almost obsessive. It
gets articulated in official documents and in the writings of
men who have had an important role in the development
of education policy, as a commitment to the ideological
basis of Pakistan. As an Indian reader of Pakistan's
educational policy-its latest version is intended to cover
the period from 1998 to 2010-one is struck by the ease
with which the word 'ideology' is used to define or justify
the orientation of the system and its curriculum. This is
how the latest policy document talks about the role of
ideology:
Although the previous educational policies did dilate
on Islamic education and Pakistan ideology, but
these policies did not suggest how to translate the
Islamic ideology into our.moral profile and imbibe
it in our educational system.9
But this usage of the term 'ideology' is not new. I.H.
Qureshi, whose influence on Pakistan's education system
extended over a long time since its inception, wrote that
'all patriotic educationists would agree that the textbooks
should reflect our ideology and values' .10 Apparently, the
word 'ideology' is used in Pakistan to indicate a rationale
for national self-identity. As a term, it forms the heart of
an educational discourse that an Indian cannot easily
comprehend. The effort to understand it requires us to

notice the self-portrait and the anxiety that state documents
and prescribed textbooks project in Pakistan.
Pronouncements of the kind quoted earlier can be read
in different ways: they may be interpreted as expressions of
the anxiety born out of Pakistan's historical experience;
they may also indicate the stagnation of the educational
policy. Keeping this range of interpretations in mind, we
can attribute the urge to emphasize Pakistan's uniqueness
to a basic tension which is inherent in the historical genesis
of Pakistan. This tension arises out of the hope that
religion can be used as a morally regenerating force on the
one hand, and the modalities that the task of political
mobilization necessarily involved under colonial and post-
colonial conditions, on the other. The demand for the
creation of Pakistan had in it an idealist promise which
drew its mobilizing resources from religion even as it
cobbled a material base in a dispersed petite bourgeois
class. 11 In any promise of this kind, an inexhaustible source
of self-criticism and appeal for deeper commitment are to
be expected as strategies for sustenance. Religion is, after
all, the ultimate expression of the human urge for an ideal
life. When a political struggle is based on it, it is more than
likely to become a never-ending game of the recovery of
faith. In such a struggle, the common people have a highly
ambiguous role to play. Their cultural practices and values
are constantly under assessment by the leaders who must
articulate the demand for faith in the nation, which translates
into faith in a religion. In such a nation, people's culture
is never free to be the locus of debate on civic values;
rather, the culture must face the critique of being consistent
or otherwise with the values prescribed in religion.
Education is particularly vulnerable to this critique for
two reasons, one theoretical and the other historical. The

theoretical reason is that education on its own is often seen
as an expression of philosophical ideals. In all traditional
conceptions of education, including Islamic ones, moral
ideals concerning the development of character, individual
or social, get priority over everyday life in which learning
or education occurs in the course of cultural practices. 12
When education is discussed in a nation-state which is
conceptually based on religion, it is highly unlikely that
the everyday cultural practices of common people will be
treated as the key context of education. In such a nation-
state, moral promises of education are likely to gain
overwhelming importance, and that is precisely what has
happened in the case of Pakistan.
The second reason why education is particularly
vulnerable to a constant critique which reiterates ultimate
ideals, lies in the · colonial history of education in the
subcontinent. The colonial conception of education, as
distinguished from colonial policy, was based on a moral
assessment of the colonized by the colonizer. A substantial
part of the epistemology of colonial educational practices
was structured around a moral critique of Indian society
and culture. Text book content in different school subjects
was designed to counter those characteristics of the
traditional culture which the colonizer had identified as
morally enfeebling. These were typically described as the
lack of moral fibre and proneness to being guided by
emotions rather r:han rationality. Curricular practices
promoted under colonial rule conflicted with the child's
cultural milieu, though as a system, education helped
colonial rulers to consolidate their alliance with the
traditionally dominant sections of society. Schools treated
upper- and lower-caste children quite differently, but
classroom processes remained isolated from children's

everyday life in a pervasive sense, ignoring the skills,
knowledge and the aesthetic traditions of rural society. 13
Post-independence educational policies in India and
Pakistan have reinforced this epistemic structure of colonial
education. In Pakistan, the national ideal of Islam as the
state religion has further strengthened the system's inherent
tendency to separate the child from the living reality of the
daily practices, material as well as cultural, surrounding
him. Religion has provided an additional layer to the
colonial argument that the main purpose of education is to
strengthen the child's character. The dimensions in which
the goal of moral improvement is defined have changed
somewhat, but the preponderance of the moral has remained
unchanged. Emphasis on moral development implies a
number of additions to the traditional concern for personal
conduct and commitment to community values. During
the Zia years, moral development was increasingly defined
as dedication to the national ideal of an Islamic republic. In
practical terms, it meant the internalization of a masculine,
war-oriented and essentially anti-Hindu ideal of the nation-
state.14 To what extent the education system could actually
disseminate this ideal was a different matter. As a goal, it
gained official approval.
After the first two post-Independence decades of official
attempts to modernize the system of education as a whole,
Pakistani authorities used state education to harness the
political support of the ulema, leaving the post-colonial
elites free to develop their private schools in keeping with
the traditions of 'public' school practices. 15 These schools
have incorporated some aspects of modern pedagogic theory
into the general pattern of a disciplinarian regime that
'public' schools stand for in South Asia. In the state-run
system, curriculum policy went through dramatic changes

after the Ayub era even as the imperative to accommodate
Islamic revivalism in a half-reformed colonial system of
education became a political necessity. The new trends
included emphasis on the teaching of religion; centralized
decision-making and; after 1971, the promotion of 'Pakistan
ideology'. Introduction of 'social studies' in the Ayub era
was a part of the modernization drive; it was now subsumed
under 'Pakistan Studies' though, in the junior classes, the
earlier approach remained intact. 'Pakistan Studies' as a
school subject symbolized the post-1971 effort to reconstruct
the nation's self-identity. It also implied a deeper alienation
of curriculum policy from the everyday reality of children,
and from the vast body of historical knowledge which held
Pakistan and India epistemically together. As a substitute
for the study of history, 'Pakistan Studies' paved the way
for what Ayesha Jalal has called the 'amalgamation of
bigotry and power'. 16
The concept of 'Pakistan Studies' made a great impact
on the history syllabus, particularly on the narrative of the
freedom struggle. The new subject legitimized the already
prevalent tendency to jettison the notion of a common
cause that the anti-colonial struggle had nurtured in different
sections of Indian society. Authors of 'Pakistan Studies'
textbooks were expected to identify with the 'Pakistan
Movement' and tell a story much shorter and simpler than
that narrated by authors of earlier textbooks. The history
of earlier periods was also rewritten with the purpose of
denying any significance to the pre-Islamic past of the
Indian subcontinent and denigrating the emergence of
accommodative cultural and political trends in the late-
medieval period. 17
Much has happened in Pakistan's political life since the
end of Zia-ul-Haq's military rule in 1988, but the shape
that curriculum and educational policy acquired during his

regime have remained largely intact. For one thing,
centralized designing of syllabus and textbooks has not
been questioned. Institutions of civil society have regained
some strength, but apparently not enough to raise a
comprehensive debate on the aims of education in the
context of Pakistan's multi-ethnic society.
The struggle between modernist and fundamentalist
elements has been a central theme of Pakistan's political
history since independence, but this struggle does not
receive the appreciation it deserves from many observers of
Pakistan, including Indian ones, who find fault with the
very idea of Pakistan. The same applies to the development
of the economy and commerce, which according to Reetz,
have had a strong integrating influence on Pakistan's
national life. 18 A common perception is that Pakistan's
economy is in a chronic state of crisis. The rise of religious
sectarianism and fundamentalism, particularly in the wake
of the civil war in Afghanistan, has contributed to a
depressive domestic ethos. The situation is further aggravated
by the fact that the westernized elite are willing to
compromise with religious fundamentalists. According to
Malik, this strategy of compromise is based on the mistaken
premise that cultural and religious revivalism can be handled
by means of occasional political accommodation. 19 As far
as education is concerned, the presence of revivalist, sectarian
voices is substantial. Even if state departments of education
and teacher training institutions are not all fundamentalist
in outlook, the ethos in which they function certainly
carries a pronounced stamp of fundamentalism. That is the
ethos in which official textbooks are written, taught and
read.
Certain parallels with India can now be noticed. There
is no denying the fact that the politics of religious and caste
identity has gained popularity over the last two decades

due to the propagation of inter-religious suspicion and
caste hatred. The main axis of the politics· of religious
revivalism remains what it was during the anti-colonial
struggle-namely, the Hindu-Muslim relationship-but other
axes have surfaced from time to time, depending on regional
compositions and situations. Hindu revivalism broadly
underlies this phenomenon, but its diverse political and
cultural expressions are not easy to trace. The decline of
the Congress as a party committed to secularism and the
rise of Islamic fundamentalism in India's neighbourhood
and within India form the background required to explain
the rise of the Bharatiya J anata Party and its associate
groups during the 1990s. The impact of these political
developments on education has been quite noticeable, even
in elite public schools which are normally regarded as
bastions of the liberal personality. State-run schools have
also undergone a loss of resistance to religio-revivalist
propaganda. Both teachers and children have been exposed
to the propaganda of religious revivalism in their life
outside school. Besides, there has been a remarkable rise in
the number of schools directly run by revivalist
organizations. The vast chain of Saraswati schools is one
prominent network of revivalist educational effort; there
are several parallel religio-educational networks of this
kind in operation now. 20
Seen in this grim background, the official policy to
propagate secularism with the help of textbooks looks like
using an ageing barrier against a powerful current. The
importance given in recent policy documents to 'value
education'-a cover for ideological indoctrination-is an
ominous pointer to future dangers.
Common Heritage
The differences we notice between the educational and
political scenarios of present-day India and Pakistan need
not cloud our appreciation of the status and power that
prescribed textbooks have in the educational system of
both countries. The peculiar hold that textbooks have on
the system can only be understood in the historical context
of colonial policies. The construction of official knowledge
became an important aspect of the colonial enterprise once
education was accepted as an administrative need and
responsibility. 21 In all subjects, including history, textbooks
and examinations emerged as the two vital instruments of
control on what might be taught and learnt in the expanding
system of education. The content of textbooks would
reflect the official perspective, and the highly centralized
examination procedures would ensure that the content was
usecJ as the boundary for the teacher's role as an interpreter
or elucidator. Questions asked in the examination paper
had to be strictly from the textbook, and the answer which
closely reflected the content of the text got the highest
marks. Under the colonial system, textbooks were
prescribed, not just recommended or approved. That is
why publishers vied with one another to get their textbooks
prescribed.
Some aspects of this system have changed, but the
importance of the textbook in the school's daily life and its
status as the only reliable indicator of what is expected in
the examination have remained intact. Both India and
Pakistan now have state institutions like textbook boards
and corporations that prepare textbooks, and many of
them are also directly involved in publishing. The NCERT
in India, and the Federal Curriculum Wing in Pakistan, are
key apparatuses of the gigantic state machinery which

controls and distributes knowledge across the system.
Though terms like 'curriculum' and 'syllabus' are in use, in
practice, it is the prescribed textbook which acts as the de
facto curriculum. Indeed, the official syllabus does not
reach thousands of state schools; the textbook does, and its
content tells both the teacher and the student how to
prepare for the examination. In any case, the syllabus is no
more than a list of topics to be covered, and many
textbooks reflect just that in their contents page. Also,
conventions of paper-setting for the crucial examinations
taken at the end of Classes X and XII require that nothing
which has been left out by textbook writers will be asked
in examinations. Even privately published textbook and
examination guides-in many cases, the difference between
the two is marginal-also reflect the requirements of the
syllabus-examination nexus.
Let us look at an examination question to make this
discussion a little more specific before we conclude it. Here
is a five-mark question, asked in the CBSE Class XII
examination in the year 2000, for history: 'In what way did
the revolt of 1857 influence the nationalists during the
struggle for freedom?' The question assumes that there is
one particular 'way' in which the 1857 revolt influenced
later nationalists. That one way is explained in the prescribed
textbook, and students are expected to reproduce the
vocabulary and ·argument that the textbook uses. In any
case, a five-mark question does not allow the kind of time
it would take the examinees to devise their own arguments.
Under the pressure of this kind of system, textbooks do
become 'official gospels', as Jalal says in a paper on Pakistan's
history books. 22 She also makes an insightful observation
about the long-term importance of textbook learning. It is
a common experience that information or facts memorized

for an examination are forgotten soon after it is over. So,
one may ask, is the content of textbooks, worth analysing
in detail? Jalal says:
The gems of wisdom contained in textbooks rarely
survive the writing of the exam. But with help
from the state-controlled media, the lessons learned
at school and college serve as the alphabet and the
grammar that makes psyches literate in the idioms
of national ideology. 23
The symmetry she draws between textbooks and the media
may not be fully applicable to India, but the point that
textbooks represent the grammar of 'national ideology' is
true for both countries. For a fuller understanding of this
grammar, it is worth examining school textbooks.
PART II
Rival Histories
5
Freedom Struggle As
a Narrative
'At the stroke of the midnight hour', Jawaharlal Nehru

said on 14 August 1947, 'when the world sleeps, India will
awake to life and freedom.' Nehru was apparently addressing
a world audience, a community of free nation-states which
India was about to enter. The struggle for freedom from
colonial rule had ended. The same struggle had created a
national fraternity in a highly complex society characterized
by a hierarchy of castes, and a multiplicity of languages and
faiths. Religious divisions proved more difficult to bridge
than the distinctions of language or caste. These had, under
colonial conditions, created the ground for the rise of a
rival national fraternity called Pakistan. Freedom had a
different meaning for Pakistan, for it was born as a result
of India's freedom struggle, not merely 'woken up', as
70 Rival Histories
India was from a long sleep in Nehru's choice of metaphor.

But for both India and Pakistan, the fight against the
British was to have great value as a memory. By preserving
it and passing it on to the young, they could hope to
consolidate themselves as nation-states. Older nation-states,
whose national identities had been born as far back as the
eighteenth century or since, had done exactly that.
Generation after generation, they had engaged the young
in what Anderson 1 calls 'the deep shaping of imagination'
which is required to sustain faith in a national community.
India and Pakistan needed to do the same thing, by
recasting the record of their struggle for freedom into a
narrative for the young.
The common desire of adults to tell children what had
happened before they were born, spontaneously gives past
experiences the form of a story. Without deliberate planning,
memory acquires the structure and tone of a narrative.
Features like a beginning and an end surface in a manner
we can only call spontaneous, and the narrative is articulated
in a tone of reassurance that certifies the authenticity of the
story. This common, everyday experience of adult discourse
for children is a metaphor that enables us to conceptualize
the job done by historians who write school textbooks.
Throughout this book I have referred to these writers as
'school historians', although I am aware that some of them
are professional historians who have written school
textbooks, under a special assignment. While writing
scholarly books of history, they deal with the past as a
lawyer might deal with a case, or an architect with a
contract for a building-with considerable freedom to apply
the instruments of their profession to reconstruct and
represent the past. When they act as school historians,
however, they have a special kind of job, comparable to
Freedom Struggle As a Narrative 71
that of a lawyer who represents the state or an architect

who is under a contract to design a national monument.
The modern enterprise of school education is inevitably a
state enterprise, and in no area of knowledge is the state's
sensitivity towards the structure and style of representation
as high as in history. History assumes the focus of the
state's anxiety to structure what Rennie calls, 'an image of
a common past designed to cement group cohesion and
build solidarity' .2
In the school textbooks of India and Pakistan we have
two prototypes of the story of freedom from colonial rule.
On the face of it, they look like two versions of a common
past. Within each version there are several variations, but
no variation within each prototype displays the sharpness
that distinguishes the two prototypes. The distinctions
have much to do with the fact that they represent 'national'
versions. What makes them sharply distinct, rather than
merely different, is the peculiar relationship of the two
nations which use the dual versions of history as a means
of socializing the young into a national identity. Inasmuch
as the relationship is based on hostility and mutual denial
of integrity, the two prototypes make rival attempts to use
historical memories as a resource for national imagination.
In the chapters that follow, the two prototypes of the
story of freedom will be referred to as 'master narratives'.
The term implies an overarching commonality that different
textbooks of history in each country demonstrate as a
national set. The commonality is obviously related to the
national perspective that different authors share despite
variations in their interpretation of specific events and
approach to the subject. Inasmuch as the school historians
of each country take a 'national' stance on the past, they
remind us of the truth of Hobsbawm's contention that
72 Rival Histories
'history is not ancestral memory or collective tradition ...

It is what people learn from priests, school masters, the
writers of history books and the compilers of magazine
articles and television programmes'. 3
Three Traits
Three salient features have been used in this study as the
criteria for comparing the two master narratives. One is
the politics of mention; the other two are pacing and the
conception of the end. The first two are categories that
might be regarded as being universally applicable for the
study of historical narratives. The third one has a special
appeal for this study. By politics of mention I mean the
decision to include or exclude an event or part of an event
in the· narrative. 4
The decision to mention a name or to overlook it is
similar since such decisions ultimately reflect the politics of
memory which is integral to the discipline of history,
particularly when this discipline supplies narratives of the
past for the school-going child. Numerous examples, which
will be cited in the course of this study, show that the
decision to mention an event or a person, and the alternative
decision to not mention these are directly related to the
process of identity-building in a national context. That
process is more complex and larger than history-writing
for children, but its influence on the latter cannot be
denied. At any given point in time, school historians are
influenced by the larger process of identity-building as they
decide whether a fact is worth mentioning. The decision to
offer an elaborate explanation or not has similar roots.
Items that seem worthy of elaboration are almost inevitably
the ones which have contemporary significance in the
process of national management and consolidation.
Pacing is an aspect of story-telling which has many

linkages with the politics of mention discussed earlier, but
it also has to do with the nature of an education system,
particularly how it treats knowledge-as a body of facts or
as an opportunity to make sense. Both India and Pakistan
have examination-centred systems of education, which
means that the students are socialized and trained to pay
more attention to individual facts than to the connections
between them. 5 In history, this means rapid movement
from event to event, with a few points thrown in by way
of explaining the direction that the events took. The
school historian is expected to move briskly from one
event to the next, constructing what we might call an
episodic memory chain. The compact size of textbooks-a
sure way to keep the price down-does not allow room for
leisurely interpretation.
The third feature is the conceptualization of the end or
the point where a narrative of history comes to a stop. For
the freedom struggle of India and Pakistan, that point
comes in 1947. That this end point is conceptualized very
differently in the master narratives of the two countries has
to do with the nature and logic of the national memory
that these narratives construct. For India, the end sigp.ifies
a great achievement, along with a terrible sense of loss and
sadness. For Pakistan, the end signifies a remarkable
achievement, somewhat midgated by a sense of injustice.
There are other nuances too. A sense of self-protection and
escape is embedded in the Pakistani master narrative; a
sense of failure to subvert a conspiracy is embedded in the
Indian master narrative. As a moot structural feature, these
differences have implications for the treatment that certain
events, which occurred as much as two decades or more
before the end, receive. School historians in both countries
74 Rival Histories
seem acutely sensitive to the specific character of the

memory of the 'end' which is relevant to the two
nationalisms. They routinely use their knowledge of the
end to project intentions and apprehensions on to the
actors involved in history.
The 'end' has another implication which colours its
significance as memory in the two countries. In the Indian
case, the end of the freedom struggle marks the end of the
history syllabus and the textbook in most states. After
more than five decades of independence, the Indian system
of education has not been able to introduce the history of
post-independence India in the school curriculum. 6 In certain
states like U ttar Pradesh, the history textbook offers in ,1
few pages a sketchy run of the main events that have
occurred since 1947, but this kind of coverage is essentially
a listing, not history. For the majority of school-children,
the history of India starts in ancient times and comes to an
end in 1947. In this manner, the end of the freedom
struggle also marks the end of history, i.e. the history one
learns at school. Thus, Partition comprises the latest news
that Indian students receive about Pakistan. True, they are
exposed to the knowledge that news bulletins and films on
television bring, but this kind of knowledge has neither the
stamp of validity that schools offer nor any systematic
organization.
The Pakistani case is quite remarkably different in its
treatment of 1947 as the 'end' of the freedom struggle. This
end also constitutes the formal beginning of the nation-
state called Pakistan, and it is hardly surprising that in
contrast to India, Pakistan has introduced post-independence
history in a substantial manner at various stages of education.
In the Pakistani structuring of knowledge about the past,
the Partition of India as an 'end' of the freedom movement
is embedded in a longer history which, in fact, starts from

1947. Most textbooks discuss the division of assets and
other problems of national reconstruction faced during the
years following independence. The Objectives Resolution
passed in 1949, the attempts to make and remake a
Constitution, Five-Year Plans, and the process of
Islamization cover a substantial portion of senior-level
textbooks. All these topics, particularly the process of
Isl~mization, provide a continuity to the history of the
Pakistan Movement which forms the focus of the narrative
of freedom. Only a few textbooks, used in upmarket
English-medium schools, dwell on painful topics like the
dismemberment of Pakistan in 1971.
Blurred Divergence
The divergence we find in the Indian and Pakistani
perceptions of the end of the freedom struggle encourages
us to assume that the histories presented in the textbooks
of the two countries would generally comprise mirror
images of each other. Such an assumption would seem
plausible in view of the continuous animosity that has
characterized the relationship between India and Pakistan
since 1947.
Not just the wars they have formally fought with each
other, but even peacetime domestic developments and
events in the rest of the world have been reported in
contrasting ways by the media of the two countries. It is
also self-evident that they do not have common national
heroes. Quite sensibly, then, their textbooks can be expected
to represent the struggle waged against the British in
contrasting ways. Plausible though such a hypothesis looks,
the fact is that the master narratives we confront in the
school textbooks of India and Pakistan do not constitute
mirror images of each other. The two narratives are
76 Rival Histories
different, but in a highly complex manner. It is not as if

each episode to which great significance is attached in one
is trivialized in the other. Rather, we find that there is a
selection of historical facts which follows an interpretable
trajectory. As we come closer to the end of the narrative,
i.e. to Independence and Partition, the selection becomes
increasingly stringent and the contrast between the two
narratives gets sharper. In earlier episodes, the mention or
discussion of an event, or silence over it, is more random,
suggesting a vague kind of memory politics which becomes
clearer in the later· episodes.
The complexity we see in the representation of events
applies to the portrayal of eminent personalities as well. It
is not true that the heroes of one narrative appear as
villains in the other. Rather, we find that textbook writers
of the two countries assign different levels of significance
to a common set of personalities. In certain cases, different
segments of an individual's biography are highlighted. This
happens, for example, in the case of Syed Ahmad Khan
and Iqbal. Indian textbooks prefer to confine their attention
to the earlier part of their lives whereas Pakistani texts
prefer to focus on the later part.
In the Pakistani representation of Gandhi and the
Indian representation of Jinnah, we find serious distortions,
but they seem to be rooted more often in the overlooking
of certain details than in putative. misrepresentation with
the help of adjectives. Despite the hostility and strategic
indifference shown by the two nation-states in their official
behaviour, their school textbooks contain several common
memories, including memories of individuals who achieved
eminence in the course of the freedom movement. If a
South Asian history of the freedom struggle is ever written
for a combined readership of the children of India, Pakistan
Freedom Strugsle As a Narrative 77
and other countries in the region, such common memories

will obviously have great value.
One reason why the two master narratives are not as
strikingly divergent as to look like mirror images can be
found in the number of similarities they feature. We have
already discussed (in Chapter 3) the source of similarities
embedded in the common colonial educational heritage of
India and Pakistan, such as the overwhelming role the
prescribed textbooks have in shaping classroom teaching.
Here I want to refer to a similarity underlying the
historiography used in the two master narratives. They
both focus on 'high' politics rather than on the social
dynamics which find expression in politics.
Some of the Indian textbooks claim that they attempt
to take a comprehensive look at history, including its
social and economic aspects. More than others, the textbooks
published by the NCERT emphasize that they concentrate
on 'forces, movements and institutions rather than on
details of military and diplomatic events, and on the
biographical details of individual administrators and leaders'?
This claim is borne out to a far greater extent in the
coverage of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries
than of the twentieth. The twentieth-century segment of
the narrative of the freedom movement in the NCERT
textbooks is just as devoid of sociological insights as this
segment is in other Indian textbooks. The focus,
consistently, is on political events and decisions taken by
eminent leaders and British administrators. In many cases,
events are represented solely as the outcome of decisions
taken by leaders. This tendency is particularly strong in
the representation of Muslim society and its politics. Muslim
separatism is interpreted in terms of the motives and
responses of a few political leaders.
78 Ri·val Histories
That there were millions of ordinary men and women

who constituted the society engaged in the struggle against
colonial rule is a thought a young reader of textbooks
might occasionally entertain, but the texts themselves do
not use it as a constant frame of reference. Where these
ordinary people do appear, they do so as objects of
mobilization, virtually at the mercy of powerful, larger-
than-life politicians who designed the directions to which
the people might be led. That these millions of people were
simultaneously going through a socio-economic
transformation which had its own implications, both
psychological and sociological, stays far from the orbit of
attention sketched out by the writers of school textbooks.
One aspect of the problem is that no single, overarching
narrative can comfortably and justly accommodate the
diversity of people's experiences, perceptions and
movements. The attempt to impart to the freedom struggle
an overarching character also suffers from the tendency to
narrate its story in a mainly politico-administrative
framework.
The freedom struggle, even in terms used by its avowed
leaders, was not confined to politics; it had explicit elements
of social reform and change, such as Gandhi's movement
against untouchability. Textbooks mention these social
currents mainly with reference to the leaders who initiated
or advocated them, not as aspects of socio-cultural change.
The larger process inherent in the changes that technology
and industrialization had brought about in transport,
communication, employment and education receives
nominal importance, that too mainly in the context of the
nineteenth century. A few text writers, who try to discuss
these processes at some length, do so without establishing
any comprehensible linkages between them and socio-
political changes.
This larger process may be addressed by invoking the

concept of modernization even though it is vague and
capable of being interpreted in several ways. The idea of
the individual as a unit of society, and the rise of
communities inspired by a virtual self-image have a lot to
do with processes associated with industrialization and
modernization. Technological changes in modes of
communication and storage of information and economic
changes linked to capitalist development are historically
responsible for the idea of self-identity in both a personal
and collective sense. In the latter sense, self-identity lay at
the heart of early nationalist politics in all modern societies
as Freitag has pointed out. 8 Politics of the kind that was
taking root towards the end of the nineteenth century in
colonial India had a 'modern' character inasmuch as it
involved the formation and expression of self-identity.
Based on a highly limited franchise, politics under colonial
rule triggered off an intense competition among elite groups,
religious communities and castes. Though it had the formal
features of democracy, it aroused collective anxieties and
fears as often as it shaped new dreams and aspirations.
Unfortunately, no Indian or Pakistani textbook discusses
the nature and logic of political life under the British, or
explains how it was different from politics today.
Personalities of religious reformers and political leaders
have a greater presence in the Pakistani master narrative
from its beginning. Even primary-level children.are required
to memorize whole lists of names. Some of the names
included in these lists date back to medieval times.
Textbooks assert that the Muslims residing in the Indian
subcontinent always maintained their distinct cultural
identity despite the influential presence of the Hindu
religion. Yet, no glimpse of cultural life that children
80 Rival Histories
might relate to or explore further is provided by these

books. How the arrival of print technology and modern
transport affected culture and language is among the
numerous pedagogically interesting issues that Pakistani
school historians totally ignore. This is not to suggest that
Indian textbooks treat these issues in any distinctly better
manner.
Education is the only aspect of civic life that Pakistani
textbook writers attempt to weave into the narrative of
freedom, but even here the emphasis is on the efforts of
one individual: Syed Ahmad Khan. However, his personality
is portrayed in stock terms, with hardly any details that
might enable children to place him in a historical context.
In the matter of ignoring the child's perspective and
making no provision for entry points or clues which
children might use to extend their textbook learning,
Pakistani writers are one with their Indian counterparts.
Their common preoccupation is to build a pantheon. The
names engraved in gold inside it are supposed to inspire
veneration and awe, not to motivate the young to examine
the lives of the named individuals with curiosity and
patience.
This shared incapacity makes sense in the context of
the second similarity between the two master narratives.
Both treat the freedom struggle as ·an allegory, composed
for the purpose of reminding the young that they are
inheritors of a great storehouse of values. Great personalities
are presented essentially as embodiments of values and
ideals which the young readers are expected to imbibe. The
assumption is that the story of the freedom movement
conveys a coherent set of values. The thought that many
of the great leaders involved in the national movement
believed in strikingly divergent ideals does not disturb the
narrators. 9 Ideals are attributed not only to individual

personalities, but to the struggle itself. The story of freedom
taught to children in India and Pakistan acquires, at a
number of junctures, a vocal sense of uninterrupted
continuity of the present with the past. At this level, the
narrative becomes a statement of collective values and
identity, reminding the young readers of today that 'we'
are the same people who fought against the British. It is in
this mode that the narrative of freedom in both countries
attains its deepest resonance which we will now attempt to
analyse.
Memory Posters
Collective memory is not an aggregate ·of individual
memories, but rather a new structure on its own. It takes
shape in the course of adult transmission of the knowledge
concerning the past, both in informal settings like home
and formal settings like the school. To receive and assimilate
this knowledge is an important part of growing up. Adult-
child interaction permits some room for the child's own
devices, but in the case of knowledge concerning what
happened in the past, the child has no access to independent
resources. Becoming party to a collective memory of the
past and developing a sense of identity consistent with that
memory are inevitable aspects of socialization. If a narrative
of history is designed to give children no clue regarding its
basis or logic, it is highly likely that they might internalize
it as a series of memory posters-scenes of the past hanging
free of a time-frame. The history taught in school is highly
conducive to the propagation of memory posters. In
comparison with other school subjects, history offers the
least opportunities for children to exercise their reason or
82 Rival Histories
judgement, for it gives no clues regarding the method

followed by historians. The writer of school textbooks of
history simply conjures up images of great individuals or
scenes of political drama. This magical character of school
history promotes the formation of poster memory which
requires no awareness of time and no analytical reasoning
to back it.
The self-image of a 'fighting people' is the basic
substance of the biggest memory posters that the school
history of the freedom movement attempts to paint. It is
when we delve into this common self-image and break it
up into two national self-images, that we get the first
glimpse of a major structural difference between the Indian
and the Pakistani master narratives. In the Indian narrative,
the 'fighting people' are identified as the ones who fought
against the British. The idea of 'fight' is the conventional
one, in which the defeated is forced out of the land wl:iere
the fight has taken place. This connotation of the 'fight'
for freedom can be seen in a substantial part of the story
of the national movement written in a capsule form for
primary school-children, and in an elaborated version for
older ones. The narratology applied in the capsule form
presents Congress leaders and the British standing face to
face, while the long time-span of the battle shrinks into a
handful of episodes that comprise a three-page story. In
this highly compressed version served to the primary
schoolchild, the story of freedom becomes a string of
memory posters depicting dramatic confrontations. These
are elaborated when a large number of personalities and
events are incorporated in the story written for older
children. The essential story remains the same-a revelation
of how the British were physically thrown out of the
country. They are represented as an exhausting enemy
who is always ready to take recourse to cruel and barbaric

means.
The textbooks of both India and Pakistan refrain from
explaining that British colonizers were different from earlier
conquerors in that they did not intend to stay on in India.
The adolescents in middle and secondary classes have a
propensity to form general concepts on the basis of limited
exposure. It is a serious cognitive challenge for them to
recognize that terms like 'ruler' and 'conquest' have a
highly specific meaning when they are applied in a colonial
context. To meet this challenge, they would need a text
carefully designed to include comparative commentary and
contextualized details. The bulk of textbook writers in
India and Pakistan do not even approach the task. They do
not even go so far as to allow their readers to realize how
small and demographically insignificant the physical presence
of the British was in India. As background information,
school historians do tell their readers that the purpose of
British rule was to exploit India economically and to
subdue it culturally, but this information figures in the
history of the pre-nationalist phase of colonial rule. Once
the narrative of freedom starts, the exploitative character
and practices of colonial rule slip out of focus.
Why did the people of India need to fight such a long
and difficult battle against the British? The answer one can
decipher in both Indian and Pakistani textbooks is: because
the British were foreigners or outsiders. The school books
of both countries agree on the point that 'we' fought
against the British because they were British. The narrative
of freedom gives far more importance to the foreignness of
the British as the reason why Indians had to fight against
them than to the role of the British colonial rule in India's
impoverishment. The idea of British foreignness is simple
84 Rival Histories
and true; and therein lies its strength. However, conceding

the obvious truth of this idea amounts to permitting the
narrative of freedom to slip into a deep repertoire of
cultural archetypes that govern the popular understanding
of India's long history and continuous identity. As part of
an uninterrupted story of India since ancient times, the
freedom struggle becomes just one more episode featuring
a battle with outsiders. Neither Indian nor Pakistani school
historians are able to take along the young reader towards
developing a conceptual or 'formal' -in a Piagetian sense-
understanding of colonialism. Indeed, the textbook authors
of both countries seldom rise above the tendency to
represent a vivid and mostly personified battle between the
Indians and the British. Such a representation inevitably
denigrates the status of the freedom movement in the
annals of national history, obfuscating its distinctive
character and social aims. 10 In particular, it denigrates the
ideal of secular humanism and equality which found
expression in the lives and conduct of some of the highly
respected minds involved in the freedom struggle.
Beyond the initial commonality of meaning cited above
in the self-identity of 'the fighting people' lies the specific
connotation it acquires in Pakistani textbooks. It arises
from a sense of escape as a result of 'awakening'. The
Pakistani school historians intersperse the narrative of
freedom with the assertion of an awakening which is quite
different from the 'cultural awakening' we read about in
Indian textbooks in the context of the nineteenth century.
Pakistani textbooks use the term 'awakening' in the sense
of becoming aware of a risk or danger. The assertion
Pakistani school historians make about this awareness
intensifies as they approach the last two decades of the
freedom struggle. 'Awakening' now involves several discrete

processes, including consolidation as a political entity and
the recognition that Muslims have a distinct destiny to
pursue. These elements of 'awakening' came together to
form a complex statement on 'why we insisted on Partition?'
Although the Pakistani story of the 'awakening' is a
historical story, it is represented to children in a timeless
mode. Events that occurred in different epochs and around
personalities as different as Shah Waliullah, Syed Ahmad
Khan, and Jinnah, are welded together to form an account
that makes the 'awakening' of Muslim people in the Indian
subcontinent a predestined, stepwise revelation. The heroic
glamour that this narrative necessarily imparts to the
individuals involved in it makes it a quasi-religious narrative.
Running parallel to the political narrative of freedom from
colonial rule, it provides an e:x;planation for the urge to
seek a formal separation which directed the leadership of
the Muslim League in the last two decades of the freedom
struggle.
The Pakistani school historian, thus, covers two tracks-
one, the gradual unfolding of the vision of 'homeland', and
two, the slow political progress towards the realization of
that vision. The national memory of Pakistan appears in
school texts as a pattern in which the two tracks surface
alternately. The young reader's attention is held in a state
of balance between the two. It is a neat balance; but if we
observe it hermeneutically, it seems to tilt in favour of the
second, i.e. the political track. The search for a Muslim
'homeland' provides a grand scenery serving as a background
to the painstaking work of politician-fighters. 'Why' they
had to fight so hard to achieve their goal forms the gist of
the story. The implied young reader of the story must
learn that though a vision existed, it attained clarity only
86 Rival Histories
during the time spent on hard political effort. The effort

proved hard because the alternative ways of achieving the
vision diminished only gradually.
In conclusion, we can distinguish the Indian and the
Pakistani narratives, by saying that the former focuses on
'how' freedom was achieved, while the focus of the latter
is on 'why' it had to take the form it did. The Indian
narrative is somewhat simpler in its main structure, though
its amplitude suggests a hidden complexity. It chooses to
project achievements of the Congress under Gandhi's
leadership as the central theme, but it makes a consistent
attempt to cover the activities of other organizations and
their leaders. The Indian narrative does not let its young
reader find out that there was no cohesive value-orientation
in the struggle for freedom; that, in fact, different
organizations and leaders had sharply distinct value-
preferences though their ideals looked similar. The generous,
accommodating nature of the Indian narrative stops short
of granting legitimacy to just one organization and its
vision-the Muslim League. The story of the League is
jettisoned early from the master narrative of India's freedom.
Though the Pakistani narrative has just this one organization
to cover, it acquires a complexity too, on account of its
compulsive intertwining of the League's politics with the
'awakening' of Muslims. The narrative uses the two strands
to justify why the League's leadership had to separate itself
from the strategies and the vision that drove the Congress.
6
A Beginning Located
The revolt of 1857 has elements that make it a perfect

pedagogic choice for a formal beginning of the narrative of
the freedom struggle. The remarkable pedagogic opportunity
it offers has as much to do with its placement in the record
of the freedom struggle as with its content. Given the
controversy surrounding its nature, we may well ask
whether it marks the beginning of India's struggle for
independence or only of its narrative. As far as school
textbooks are concerned, the answer is definitely the former;
and it is even more so as far as Pakistani textbooks are
concerned. School textbooks used in both countries convey
the impression that the rebels were inspired by a dream of
national independence. Hardly any text directly cautions
children about the use of terms like 'national' and
'nationalist' in the context of 1857. What is true about the
teaching of history in general applies to this episode too,
88 Rival Histories
namely, that it is represented without reference to the

nuanced meaning that the words needed for the
representation may have had at the time.
Most textbooks used in India and Pakistan present
1857 as an obvious beginning of the freedom movement.
The precise content of its representation may differ, but
the general message is clear. In the Indian case, the naming
of Class VIII and Class XII textbooks of history as 'Modern
India' ensures that the young reader will perceive the
rebellion of 1857 as an event securely embedded in the
contemporary phase of India's history. In fact, Indian
textbooks start the history of 'modern' India as early as the
beginning of the eighteenth century. No explanation is
offered for either the naming or the choice of date. The
child is expected to infer that the birth of 'modern India'
can· be seen in the decline of the Mughal empire, which
started at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The
subtext of this naming is that 'European penetration' (the
title of Chapter 2 in the Class XII NCERT textbook)
served as the instrument of India's entry into the modern
era. The label 'modern India' also fits well with the
distribution of the content of history as ~ subject over the
middle school classes. Under that distribution, 'ancient
India' is covered in Class VI, 'medieval India' in Class VII,
and 'modern India' in Class VIII.
On the face of it, the message that 'modern India' arose
out of the decline of the Mughal empire and as a result of
India's colonization, looks like common sense. Changes in
social and administrative institutions, and social reforms
during the 'social and cultural awakening' of the first half
of the nineteenth century are presented as aspects of India's
modernization that took place against the backdrop of
colonial control. In this general map of 'progress', the
A &ginning Located 89
revolt of 1857 is a bit of a puzzle. Its surface features are

as simple and clear as a textbook lesson, but its meaning is
remarkably uncertain, making it a matter of interpretation.
The surface features look so simple and predictable that it
is not surprising to find an identical structure of the
chapter on 1857 in different textbooks. It is neatly divided
into four parts: the general causes of the revolt, the
immediate cause, the main incidents, and the causes of
failure. As a chapter in a textbook and as a lesson taught
in a class, no other episode of Indian history has such
symmetry. Yet, underneath this symmetry lies the
uncertainty of interpretation and obvious difficulties in
framing the revolt within the narrative of the national
movement.
Some of the senior-level textbooks acknowledge that
1857 is a subject of great controversy among historians, but
hardly any textbook gives children a chance to make sense
of that controversy. No textbook mentions R.C.
Majumdar's contention that there was an 'absence of
nationalism' in the revolt of 1857.1 The controversy
Majumdar started by dissociating himself from the official
assignment to write a nationalistic account of the revolt is
generally ignored by school historians. S. Roy's textbook
for high school students of West Bengal mentions R.C.
Majumdar, but confines the reference to his view that the
Mutiny was started by the sepoys and later got some
popular support. We only get a hint of that controversy
from the alternative titles used in textbooks for the chapter
on 1857. Some textbooks choose to call it 'the revolt of
1857'; others call it 'the first war of independence'. ·
Textbooks which call the revolt of 1857 the 'first war
of independence' see no problem in contextualizing it in
the 'national struggle for freedom'. The UP state textbook
for high schools says: 'The revolt advanced the political
90 Rival Histories
awakening of Indian people, and movements for social

reform and modernisation had already begun.' Apparently,
the textbook writer sees no contradiction between the
politics of the revolt and the social reforms that were
taking place at the time. Ironically, the commonly discussed
'causes' of the revolt incl1.1de the very attitudes and beliefs
that social reform movements were trying to change. Only
the NCERT texts for Classes VIII and XII make an
attempt to represent the incidents of 1857 as a complex
interplay of political and social forces. Both these prominent
textbooks desist from using the term 'national' in the
context of 1857. The Class VIII text by Dev and Dev says
that 'no such groups had emerged in society as would fight
for radical changes in social and economic life, and cement
the bonds of national unity among the people'. In his Class
X NCERT textbook, however, Arjun Dev says that 'the
revolt made the Indian people more politically conscious
than before'. What 'politics' might mean in a mid-nineteenth
century context is not explained. It is in the Class XII
NCERT text by Bipan Chandra that we find an attempt to
analyse the different strands of opinion and ideology, and
to establish an imaginative symmetry to overcome any
confusion that might arise in the young reader's mind. The
endeavour deserves to be examined in some detail.
Although Bipan Chandra avoids calling the revolt a
'war of independence', he does not mind calling it a
'revolutionary war'. It. became one, he says, when the
rebels proclaimed the aged and powerless Bahadur Shah
Zafar the emperor of India. By this act, they recognized
'the fact that the long reign of the Mughal dynasty had
made it the traditional symbol of India's political unity'.
With this single gesture, Chandra says, 'the sepoys had
transformed a mutiny of soldiers into a revolutionary war'.
A Beginning Located 91
This decisive judgement on 1857 can only be interpreted in

the context of the tensions prevailing within Indian
historiography on the question of how the long period of
Mughal rule should be represented-as a process of India's
unification or as a reminder of India's weaknesses and
enslavement? The rebellion of 1857 offers a tempting
opp~rtunity to the school historian who wishes to use
secularism as an organizing idea of nationalist history.
Ironically, the revolt also forces the school historian to
accept the role of religious beliefs and practices in inspiring
people for collective action. Chandra's text confronts this
duality when he tries to explain the response of educated
Indians. He spells out and justifies their antipathy to the
rebellion by recalling the rebels' opposition to progressive
social measures. Yet, the educated class of Indians is described
as being 'mistaken' because it believed that British rule
could modernize India. The rebels, by comparison, are said
to be more 'far-sighted', possessing an 'instinctive'
understanding that foreign rule was bad. At the same time,
Chandra goes on to add: 'It cannot be said that the
educated Indians were anti-national or loyal to a foreign
regime.' Don't the post-1858 events show that the educated
Indians led a powerful anti-British movement, the text asks.
As we can see, Chandra's text assumes the character of
an interior monologue. He recognizes th;:tt both support
and opposition to the revolt cannot be neatly classified, yet
he wants to ensure that the rebellion serves as a formal
beginning of the narrativ~ of India's national freedom.
Recalcitrant aspects of the rebellion are assiduously
smoothened to allow this to happen. The use of categories
like 'the rebels' and the 'educated Indians' is one such
smoothening manoeuvre. It does not work as well as the
92 Rival Histories
narrator might have wished because information about the

social origins of rebel leaders contradicts the attribution to
them of an 'instinctive' understanding. If the young reader
were to imagine that the decaying feudal classes possessed
better instinctive understanding than did the embryonic
educated middle class, such a view would upturn the
conceptual infrastructure of Bipan Chandra's textbook.
The text ties itself in knots as it attempts to apportion
'progressive' and 'backward' motives to the great diversity
of the actors of 1857 and to those who did not join the
action. Ultimately, after pursuing a tortuous course of
description and argument, the text passes its verdict on the
revolt of 1857: 'Though it was a desperate effort to save
India in the old way and under traditional leadership, it
was the first great struggle of the Indian people for freedom
from British imperialism.'
Other Indian textbooks avoid this kind of long-winded
route of analysis. Some of them quote Savarkar to say that
it was the first war of independence; others use Nehru to
similar effect, although Nehru had called it 'essentially a
feudal rising' with 'some nationalistic elements in it' .2
Children are simply not allowed to realize that the incidents
of 1857 look remarkably different from different
perspectives. No Indian textbook utilizes the pedagogic
challenge that 1857 presents for exploring a moment of the
past as a historian would. An opportunity to investigate
the revolt of 1857 in this manner might involve an inquiry
into the effects of technological development, especially
the technology of communication and transport.
Alternatively, it might inspire children to study the
geography of colonial expansion. Representations of 1857
in literature could form yet another avenue of inquiry.
Above all else, the portrayal of 1857 has a great potential
to introduce children to the importance of multiple readings

and the recognition of ambiguity as an aspect of historical
enquiry. School histories foreclose all these options by
offering a cut and dried story of the movement, encased in
a historical allegory of nationalism. The dramatic eruption
and progress of the revolt, the violence and the tragedy
associated with it, and the mystery of its organization
disappear in the version that children are required to read
and accept as they begin the study of India's struggle
against colonial rule. Perhaps no school historian would
accept what T apti Roy has to say at the end of her study
of 1857 in Bundelkhand: 'whether the uprising of 1857 was
retrograde or forward-looking seems a non-question'. 3 Such
a view-which opens up the possibility of examining 1857
as history, rather than as a lesson-would be totally out of
character with the prevailing concept of children's education
and the role of history in it.
In Pakistani textbooks we find the school historians
facing a different kind of challenge, though, superficially,
the problems look similar. Most authors take the 'war of
independence' line, thereby assigning to the revolt a formal
place in the narrative of Pakistan's independence and birth.
The structure of the chapter covering the revolt has the
same four parts that it has in Indian textbooks, though the
treatment is remarkably sketchy. The main difference
between the Pakistani and the Indian treatment lies in the
emphasis placed on the role of Muslims in the former. The
revolt is presented as a brave attempt by the Muslims to
throw the British out of India and re-establish Mughal rule.
Emphasis is laid on the British perception of Muslims as
the main threat in India. Sacrifices made by Muslim rulers
and others are represented as evidence of the British
prejudice against Muslims and Islam. The revolt of 1857,
thus, serves to frame the study of Pakistan's birth in the
94 Rival Histories
longer story of Mughal power in India. The brief account

of the revolt that textbooks provide focuses the young
student's attention on the pre-existence of a unified Muslim
community which was willing to fight for its rights
and status.
This general picture of the treatment of the revolt of
1857 in Pakistani texts applies more accurately to junior-
level books than it does to high school- or intermediate-
level textbooks. For instance, Arshad's textbook for the
Class VIII children of English-medium s,;hools in Sind
shows no hesitation in calling the revolt 'a last attempt'
made by the Muslims to rout the British when everything
else had failed. While summing up the chapter on 1857,
this book says categorically that 'the war of independence
was a well-organised political movement'. Claims of this
kind are absent in senior-level books, some of which
acknowledge the eruptive and disorderly nature of the
revolt. The listing of heroes also changes from junior to
higher level textbooks. Mangal Pandey and the Rani of
Jhansi, for example, are mentioned in some of the junior-
level books, but are absent from texts for senior students.
The popular intermediate-level textbook by Rabbani and
Sayyid says that 'Hindus and other nations' also participated
in the rebellion, but the only name it mentions is that of
Bahadur Shah Zafar, who was made 'the supreme
commander of the freedom fighters'. Similarly, M.D. Zafar's
textbook finds no room for the names of the 1857 heroes
although it retains 'war of independence' as the title of its
extremely brief section on the rebellion.
Two Dilemmas
Apparently, the authors of senior-level Pakistani school
texts are aware of the dilemmas that 1857 presents as a
major event in the history of the subcontinent. One

dilemma has its origins in the fact of the dual role that any
pedagogic narrative of freedom must serve in Pakistan.
Apart from describing how colonial rule ended, the narrative
must also explain how Pakistan came into being. This
second imperative has led many school historians and
others in Pakistan to assemble a remarkably long
background for the Pakistan Movement which took shape
in the final decade and a half of the national movement for
freedom. The revolt of 1857 disturbs such an enterprise.
Any elaborate treatment of 1857 would necessitate the
recognition that Hindus and Muslims were quite capable of
fighting as a unified force. Pakistan's post-1977 curricular
policies pose a serious constraint for this recognition.
These policies have evolved in the context of a beleaguered
state which chose the teaching of religion and the writing
of history as two pedagogic instruments for consolidating
its hold. The state's perspective on Pakistan's history
forbids the authors of school textbooks from attaching any
significance to examples of Hindu-Muslim unity.
Writers of junior-level textbooks overcome this
constraint by recourse to brevity. The Punjab Textbook
Board's social studies text for Class VIII written by Shamim
and Ahmed covers the entire narrative of the Pakistan
Movement in fifteen pages. This narrative begins with a
terse reminder of the implications of 1857:
The British had not forgotten the War of
Independence waged by the Muslims against them.
The Hindus had never forgiven the Muslims for
having ruled India for centuries. Therefore, both
the communities conspired against the Muslims to
turn them into a poor, helpless and ineffective
mmonty.
96 Rival Histories
This remarkable opening gambit enables the writers of the

text to construct a firm outer frame of the story which
they want fourteen-year-olds to learn, of how the Muslims
rose from the depths of depression, reorganized themselves,
and eventually succeeded in establishing their separate
homeland. A highly compressed story does not allow the
listener to ask for details; its aim is to impress and
indoctrinate, rather than to explain. A selective listing of
facts enables the narrator to do just that. The details of
1857 are irrelevant for this capsule version of how Pakistan
came into being. We can hardly charge this version with
being irresponsible in the use of general categories like 'the
Hindus' and 'the Muslims' as sentient actors. Given its
purpose, and the official mandate to attain that purpose by
any means, the text has no choice. To say that it is a false
text is to miss the role it is supposed to perform-to clear
a nation's memory of facts and details its present-day state
finds unsettling and unnecessary.
The use of brevity as a means to erase recalcitrant facts
is not available to the senior-level text writer to the same
extent as it is to the school historian writing for younger
children. Pakistani school historians who have written
about the freedom struggle for high school and intermediate
classes and for the 'O' level are apparently aware of the
dilemmas that the rebellion of 1857 presents as a historical
event. One dilemma-the irrelevance of religious categories
for differentiating between the participants of the rebellion-
is obvious enough. Though religious beliefs and practices
were among the sources of inspiration for the revolt, the
specific religious identity of the rebels was not important
in determining their behaviour as far as we know. The
writer of a Pakistani textbook does face a problem
representing such an event within the ideological framework
of the subject called 'Pakistan Studies'. The listing of

Hindu heroes who fought in the 1857 battles is only part
of the challenge; the real challenge is to acknowledge that
there was a time when Hindus and Muslims spontaneously
fought side by side. The aim of 'Pakistan Studies', to
historicize Muslim separatism, cannot be met by letting
such a past be represented for its own sake.
A second source of dilemma lies in the structure of the
narrative itself, in the need to prepare the student for the
post-1857 developments in Muslim politics. In his extensive
critique of Pakistan's school textbooks, K.K. Aziz describes
this dilemma quite bluntly: 'Here is a conundrum for the
textbooks' writers. If it was a war of independence waged
by the Muslims against the hated British foreigner, how
can Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who sided with the British
and condemned the native rising, be presented to the
students as a "great hero" and "the greatest thinker of
Pakistan?'" 4 Although it is hard to establish that writers of
school textbooks worry about internal consistency, Aziz's
reasoning does provide an explanation for the sketchy
treatment that senior-level Pakistani textbook writers give
to the rebellion of 1857. The only exceptions are the texts
written by J. Hussain and F. Bajwa for 'O' level students.
These two textbooks apply a more sophisticated approach
to the teaching of history at school than any other textbook
used in Pakistan. Neither of them attempts to represent the
revolt of 1857 as a coherent attempt to win freedom,
although Bajwa does use the 'war of independence' title.
Regarding Bahadur Shah Zafar's leadership, Bajwa clarifies
that Zafar 'had little idea of what was happening and had
no power to stop or start a war'. Hussain uses the title 'the
great revolt', and deftly intersperses her report on regional
narratives of the revolt with the general issues that led to it.
98 Rival Histories
The Pakistani school historians do not share the

dilemma their Indian counterparts face in accommodating
the revolt of 1857. in the story of social modernization.
This is mainly because Pakistani text writers want their
readers to associate social awakening and modern education
with the post-1857 period of Indo-Pak history, especially
with the personality and efforts of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan.
For the Indian text writers, the revolt of 1857 comes after
the beginning of modern education and the initiatives of
social reformers like Raja Rammohan Roy. An old official
history of 'Hind-Pakistan', published by the Pakistan
Historical Society in 1955, describes Roy as one of the
'enlightened Hindus' who supported Bentinck's efforts for
social reform. In later textbooks of Pakistan, the theme of
social reform and spread of education was deferred until
the post-1857 period. The revolt itself was seen squarely as
a last-ditch effort by Muslims to re-establish their pow~r.
This interpretation has persisted since the 'Hind-Pakistan'
history composed in the first decade of Pakistan's existence.
Its authors had said: 'The war of Independence, which has
often been wrongly described as Mutiny, was the
culminating stage in the century-old struggle of the Muslims
to free themselves from the domination of the foreigners. ' 5
We can conclude this comparison by recalling a basic
similarity between the Indian and Pakistani versions of
1857. It lies in the treatment of the rebellion as the formal
opening of the narrative of freedom. Unlike endings,
which in the case of narratives of the freedom struggle, are
non-negotiable, beginnings imply a discovery and a sense
of judgement. To attribute the status of a 'beginning' to an
event is to signify it as a break.through. The very fact that
the revolt ended in failure suggests that it did not constitute
a breakthrough. Any search for causes of the revolt leads
us to a world that was in the process of disintegration.

Percival Spear, in his assessment of the significance of 1857
to modern India, describes it as 'a last convulsive movement
of protest against the coming of the west on the pare of
traditional India'. 6 Its effects on the course of future events
were major-both in terms of British attitudes and measures,
and for Indian responses to British rule. Though the revolt
was to serve as a great memory and source of inspiration
in the subsequent struggle for India's freedom, it is hard to
say that it was in any logical sense related to this struggle.
Yet, as the opening scene of the narrative of the freedom
movement, the revolt places a defining stamp on the nature
of the narrative. The stamp carries its own character as a
dramatic, spontaneous occurrence, a collage of face-to-face
battles. As we shall see in the following chapters of this
study, the narrative of freedom in Indian, and to a great
extent in Pakistani, textbooks maintains this stamp of 1857
to the end. The stamp allows quite a few textbook authors
in both countries to avoid engaging with the broader socio-
cultural dimensions of history, focused as they remain on
a unilinear course of events and a handful of heroes.
Some other features of the narrative also take root in
this opening scene. The flow of time is marked by a series
of dramatic events. As the story of the freedom struggle
progresses, it encourages the young reader to anticipate
dramatic happenings. Periods when nothing dramatic occurs
seem to shrink or vanish into a time warp. Towards the
final decade of the struggle, the Pakistani narrative gets rid
of this stamp of 1857, but the Indian narrative marches on
in the shadow of this early battle. Another feature that
both Indian and Pakistani narratives maintain is the
avoidance , ,· personal experience as a source of learning
about the f--.J.:. The year 1857 presents us with a remarkable
100 Rival Histories
range of individual personalities which can be studied as a

resource for better understanding of the contemporary
social climate. Textbooks offer to their young readers a
visual impression of some of these personalities, without
any interesting biographical details that might help children
to relate to them. They remain literally like deities selected
to inhabit a pantheon. Neutral witnesses and critics must
stay outside the pantheon. One such person was Ghalib
whose personality and experience could provide children
with a unique view of the year 1857. Barring S.F. Mahmud,
no school historian in Pakistan or India so much as
mentions Ghalib. As a critic of the rebellion, and as
someone who tried hard to retain British patronage, Ghalib
has no place in the story of 1857 as an episode of the
freedom struggle, though he was a great personality of his
times and is regarded as a poet of universal repute. 7
Though the chapter on 1857 ends in every textbook
with a discussion of the changes that took place after the
revolt in British policy and attitude towards Indians, and
with a few sentences thrown in about the inspirational
value the revolt had for Indians, chis discussion barely
manages to connect the revolt with later history. Why this
should be so has an obvious reason chat we can find in the
account of the revolt itself if we view it from a young
reader's perspective. The standard account is much too
interpretative to allow children to relate to it. And when
it mentions the involvement of individuals, the style is
inevitably one of hero-worship. Though any reader can see
that the rebels had no other means to express themselves
except through violence, and that the British were brutal
and unscrupulous in suppressing the revolt, the scale of
violence that took place remains vague. The drastic measures
that were taken after the revolt to physically reorganize
the neighbourhood of the Delhi Red Fort, and the

astounding number of people who were given the death
sentence for their suspected antipathy to the British, find
no reflection in school histories of either India or Pakistan.8
India's National Book Trust brought out a few years ago,
a simplified version of Khwaja Husain Nizami's remarkable
accounts of the suffering that members of Delhi's royal
families, particularly the princesses, went through. 9 As
historical narratives of an era which lies far across India's
long political struggle for independence, Nizami's stories
can greatly help present-day children to see the revolt of
1857 in human terms. So can Kipling's 1be Undertakers,
written from a British perspective. 10 Introduction to such
material would give children a much needed entry point
into a chapter of the freedom struggle which carries little
resemblance to anything that happened after it.
7
Awakening and Anxiety
The revolt ~f 1857 influenced the course of history, both

as a source of inspiration for Indians, and as a turning
point in British policy. The memory of the revolt was
glorified into a national saga throughout the long freedom
struggle. How the 'spirit of freedom' that is associated with
the revolt in nearly every textbook used in India and
Pakistan evolved into a national consciousness is a question
that puts the narratology of freedom under strain. To
begin with, the formation of consciousness is not the kind
of topic that the narrative which begins with the revolt of
1857 can conveniently accommodate and handle. Both in
content and character, the topic of national consciousness
contrasts sharply with the revolt of 1857. The movements
for social and cultural reform that arose in different regions
and communities constitute the content of this
consciousness. Chronologically, some of the major
Awakening and Anxiety 103
movements predate the revolt of 1857, and it is not clear

what role, if any, they played in inspiring the revolt or in
shaping its course. Most textbook accounts of the nineteenth
century contextualize these movements in the educational
initiatives taken by the colonial administration. Apart
from education, certain specific measures, like the banning
of Sati, taken by colonial administrators to reform Indian
society, am also mentioned. The impact of changes in trade
and transport, and the general advancement of industrial
technologies also induced social reform and heightened the
desire to be governed in a responsible manner. Advances in
technology, particularly printing and transport, are directly
related to the evolution of a new mental geography which
has direct relennce for the study of early nationalist
consciousness in many societies, including India. Textbooks
in both countries take note of this evolution, but seldom
relate it to socio-economic and political developments.
This complex interplay of ideas and material changes
would present a challenge for any narrative design. In the
case of the narrative of freedom, the challenge becomes
harder because the children who study the freedom struggle
as history during the middle and higher classes would
already have been exposed to the narrative design in their
primary classes. That previously studied narrative, concise
and whole as historical stories served in childhood usually
are, ends up serving like an outline in which the study of
history in later classes fills the details. Even Class IV and
V textbooks in India and Pakistan attempt to convey to
children a notion of nineteenth-century reform movements.
Without exception, they neglect the difficulty which
children face in grasping the abstractions underlying
routinely used terms like 'tradition', 'progress' and 'reform'.
One can hardly expect that this exposure to the ideational
104 Rival Histories
developments of the nineteenth century makes any sense

to primary school-children. This is just another example of
the tendency an Indian committee on curricular burden
has described by saying that 'a lot is taught, but little is
learnt' .1 In the case of Pakistan, the aim of this early
exposure to the discussion of national awakening is rather
different. The curriculum document, published by the
Ministry of Education in the late 1980s, explicitly states
that one of the aims of social studies in Class V is to impart
the ability to 'understand the Hindu and Muslim differences
and the resultant need for Pakistan' .2 In all probability, the
attainment of such a purpose is not left solely in the hands
of the social studies teacher, and we cannot say how much
difference the teacher or the textbook actually makes to
the shaping of children's attitudes.
The point is that in both India and Pakistan the
learning of history in the upper primary or middle classes
takes place with reference to an earlier exposure to the
story of freedom and to the reform movements of the
nineteenth century. Syllabus and textbook designers seem
to take advantage of young children's cognitive difficulty
in grasping abstractions. Telling a linear story of the
struggle against the British-starting with 1857-proves far
easier than explaining the ideas and dilemmas of nineteenth
century reformers in a communicative manner. Gender
and caste were the two basic themes on which many of rhe
reform movements pushed forward. Giving children details
of the oppression of women by men and that of the lower
castes by the upper castes may well be incompatible with
common perceptions of what is appropriate knowledge for
children. It is far easier and tempting to tell the story of
how people collectively fought against foreign oppressors.
Apart from its apparent suitability for children, such a
story also allows widely shared middle-class values and

sentiments concerning gender and caste to remain unhurt
and unchallenged.
These problems are typical of a curriculum policy
which treats the child merely as a recipient of knowledge.
Such a policy organizes the appropriate subject matter in
suitable doses, providing for an arbitrary enhancement of
the size of the dose each time it is to be served. Repetition
is assumed to be necessary for ensuring that eventually the
child will acquire at least some of the desired knowledge.
The problems of representation one finds in most Indian
textbooks when they deal with the long, post-1857 era of
'early nationalism' can be attributed to this kind of
curriculum policy. Indifference to the child's own
intellectual effort, and to the manner in which children
approach social and historical knowledge, is inherent in
this policy. Why this indifference matters especially for the
'early nationalism' phase, and more for Indian school
historians than for their Pakistani counterparts, are
interesting questions. The first question can be resolved
right away, but the second one must wait for a substantial
discussion of the Pakistani master narrative of the post-
1857 period.
The second half of the nineteenth century presents a
special problem to the school historian of the freedom
struggle because in terms of a listing of events, very little
happens during this period that can be linked up with the
revolt of 1857 in a narrative sequence. The nature of the
content that the writers of textbooks must deal with in this
period is very different from the revolt, which is supposed
to have inaugurated the struggle for freedom. It constitutes
a history of ideas rather than events, and it requires a
synthesis of information about changes occurring in several
discrete spheres of social and economic life.
106 Rival Histories
Indian textbooks usually carry an elaborate chapter

discussing the economic and cultural changes that took
place in the latter half of the nineteenth century. However,
this chapter usually comes before the one on the revolt of
1857. Many text writers allow the prose to drift back and
forth across the century, sometimes foreshadowing the
arrival of Gandhi in 1915, and at other times going back to
Raja Rammohan Roy in the space of a few sentences. The
organizing idea of this free-hand mapping of the nineteenth
century renaissance is 'cultural awakening'. This term is
used as a shorthand for intellectual currents so diversified
and complex in themselves that no definitive description
may be applicable to them. School historians attempt to
provide precisely such a description, which makes learning,
in the sense of comprehension, rather than familiarity with
facts, difficult.
The Class VIII NCERT text, for example, says that the
nineteenth century reformers 'were deeply influenced by
the ideas of rationalism and humanism and of human
equality'. The thirteen-year-olds who read this text have no
direct means of examining this attribution of an intellectual
lineage to the different reform movements. The text itself
makes no attempt to elucidate terms like 'humanism' and
'rationalism', let alone explain what they might mean in
the context of a colonized society. The Maharashtra state
textbook gives a still longer list of terms, including
'individualism', apart from 'liberty' and 'fraternity' to
characterize the ingredients of the urge that leaders of the
Indian renaissance had for 'transforming India into a modern
nation'.
Magic of Education
These versions of what happened in the nineteenth century
project a sharp bifurcation between the cultural and the
political. This is how they succeed in isolating the 1857

revolt from what happened before and after it. As one
reads the chapter on 'cultural awakening' in text after text,
one recognizes the mutation that colonialism goes througli
when the reader's attention is confined to the orbit of
cultural meanings. Colonialism, especially colonial
education, becomes something benign and glowing, a quasi-
divine means of exposing Indians to the wealth of European
knowledge and ideas. The short and self-contained story of
1857-sitting a chapter later or a chapter earlier in the
different versions-is not supposed to disturb the magical
atmosphere of cultural awakening. Social issues take the
lead here; economic and political history is put aside, to be
picked up again when new heroes like Dadabhai Naoroji
appear. Nowhere else can we see as clearly as we see here
the role of the school historian as a magician who conjures
up images and faces without giving children a chance to ask
for proof of their veracity. The magician transforms the
colonial presence into a benevolent vehicle for good and
necessary ideas with one hand, and with the other he
transforms culture into nascent politics, thereby permitting
socio-cultural reforms to become foundations of nationalism.
Young readers and their teachers who might seek to
make sense of these images are referred to the transformative
potential of education. How education enabled a supposedly
backward people to experience a deep stirring, and enhanced
cultural self-confidence is the most amazing side-story of
the master narrative of freedom. If colonial rulers needed
a magical wand to exonerate them from their numerous
excesses, school historians have given them one. Examples
of how this is done may differ in the quality of writing,
but every text makes the same basic point. The state
textbook for Class VIII children in Gujarat makes the
point quite bluntly:
108 Rival Histories
Some forces that went into the making of new

India were born in the nineteenth century. Western
education and the intellectual activities that sprang
from it were the prime forces ... Under Macaulay's
recommendation Governor-General William
Bentinck passed a law in 1853 (sic) that the
Company Government will give encouragement to
English language and science. After that English
education began at government level. In India, a
new educated class had emerged. English language
and literature inculcated in the minds of newly
educated class of youngsters modern thoughts of
freedom, equality, brotherhood and scientific way
of thinking. As a result they got inspired to bring
to an end the British rule in India by abolishing
blind beliefs, superstitions and evil customs. 3
Relatively more sober tributes to colonial education can be
found in the Class VIII NCERT text which takes care to
recognize that 'though only a small number of people
benefitted from this education, it played an important role
in bringing some of the advanced ideas of the western
world and of modern science to India'. The Class XII
NCERT text has a somewhat more balanced explanation
which distributes the sources of cultural awakening into
several discrete domains of material and cultural interaction
with Europe, including education; but the basic format of
the interpretation is the usual one. The readers of this text
are four years older than the ones to whom the junior
NCERT text is addressed: yet, it takes no advantage of
their maturer minds to represent the 'growth of new India'
in a more comprehensible and reasoned manner. It follows
all other Indian texts in constructing an anachronistic
image of the nineteenth century reformers and intellectual
leaders. According to the image, they were filled with the

desire to adapt their society to the requirements of the
modern world of science, democracy, and nationalism.
How a student of Class XII who has opted for history
would reconcile this picture of the 'world' with his or her
knowledge of mid-nineteenth century Europe is apparently
not a concern of any relevance for the narration of indian
nationalism.
The primary importance attributed to education and to
the socio-cultural reforms that it supposedly inspired has a
distinct nation-building role which is not generally paid
much attention. To examine this role one must sit in a
class where the post-1857 segment of the history of the
freedom struggle is being taught. As the teacher tells the
children what the textbook says, the classroom discourse
spontaneously moves forward to the present. Ritual and
superstition, and oppressive caste and community norms,
are presented as issues of a distant past. A rational, scientific
outlook and a commitment to equality appear like old
dreams fulfilled in the nineteenth century, long before the
birth of a modern and free nation. The ahistorical and
blatantly misleading discussion of colonial education enables
urban, middle-class students, preparing now for the
impending CBSE examination, to distance themselves from
the reality of their own education and the larger reality of
a caste-ridden democracy battling with communal forces. 4
The teacher acts as a collaborator in heightening the 'feel-
good' effect of the history lesson about the nineteenth
century by occasionally reminding children that certain
key objectives of those early social reforms are still relevant
for rural inhabitants. That hint allows spatial distancing of
the urban student while the text itself manoeuvres the
distance of time.
110 Rival Histories
This kind of a long handshake with the past is even

more obvious in Pakistani textbooks, and there it has an
explicitly stated political purpose. The account of post-
1857 developments presented to Pakistani children in most
textbooks is focused on the role of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan
and the Aligarh Movement. The long interregnum between
the revolt and the founding of the Muslim League in 1906
is covered solely by a brief biography of Syed Ahmad and
a description of his views and work. The Punjab state
textbook of social studies for Class VIII has no room for
a biographical account of Sir Syed, but it takes his
perspective in summarizing the post-1857 social ethos. The
description gives us a valuable insight into the Pakistani
master narrative of freedom:
The Hindus. soon learnt the English language,
adopted the Western style of living and occupied
important government posts. Then the events took
a new turn. Hindus who had received Western
education in England or some other countries of
Europe formed in connivance with the British
rulers a political party called the Indian National
Congress which aimed at sharing power with the
British in ruling India. They were successful in
their plans. But Muslims were losers and so when
councils were set up, they were left out. The ruling
British sensed this and felt concerned because the
Muslims did not get adequate representation. 5
A few lines later, the text tells children that the 'Congress
was an overwhelmingly Hindu body' and that Syed Ahmad
Khan advised the Indian Muslims to stay away from it.
Two features of this description are endemic to the
narratology of freedom that we find in most Pakistani
textbooks. One is the construction of categories like 'the

Hindus' and 'the Muslims'. Formed by lumping together
millions of people, such categories serve to create stereotypes
which can be conveniently invoked for the arousal of
hatred or empathy. It is true that terms like 'Hindus' and
'Muslims' are used in Indian textbooks too, and the
connotations they carry are equally prone to stereotyping.
However, Pakistani text writers use such terms as
instruments of a purposeful demonology, as Rubina Saigol
has pointed out. 6 As the narrative advances towards the
1930s, 'the Hindus' are given certain essential, unalienable
properties which are supposedly part of their nature. At
that point they become a cruel, manipulative, and unreliable
race. It is interesting that the demonology develops so
rapidly after the representation of the 1857 revolt, in
which the Hindus and Muslims fought together.
The second key feature of the description quoted
earlier is the choice of 'connivance' to characterize the
imputed relationship between Hindus and the British. The
idea that there was a tacit understanding between Hindu
leaders and British administrators runs through the Pakistani
master narrative of the freedom struggle all the way to
Partition. Barring exceptions like the books written by
Bajwa and Hussain for 'O' level students, this explicit hint
at a conspiracy against Muslims is found in just about
every textbook account of the anti-colonial struggle written
for the young, especially for the very young. The idea that,
as a whole, the Muslims were in deep trouble from early
on, that they had a narrow escape in the ultimate round,
apparently s_erves more than a political purpose in the
national memory transmitted to school-going children. It
belongs to the infrastructure of the official psyche, and in
children's textbooks it assumes the function of an
112 Rival Histories
architectural foundation for the reverence with which

children are taught to regard the great leaders who enabled
Muslims to escape their fate as victims of the Hindu
conspiracy. Syed Ahmad Khan is represented as being one
of them.
Syed Ahmad Khan

Most of the Pakistani books included in my sample discuss
Syed Ahmad Khan's biography and contribution at great
length. He is presented as both a visionary and a man of
action. Unlike Indian textbooks where he figures as one of
the many social reformers of the nineteenth century,
Pakistani textbooks portray him as a solitary figure who
was way ahead of his times. As Hussain puts it, 'he had a
deeper understanding of the realities of the new situation
after 1857'.
Although several aspects of Syed Ahmad's life and
work are covered, three themes stand out: one, his
conciliatory view of the British; two, his caution against
representative democracy and the Congress; and three, his
institutional work to promote Western education among
Muslims. In a general sense, the prominence given to these
three aspects by Pakistani school historians appears to
make the Pakistani portrayal of Syed Ahmad Khan similar
to the Indian one. However, on taking a closer look, we
find that the Pakistani representation of Syed Ahmad is
aimed at pulling him out of historical time in order to
establish him in a theoretical frame, which hangs free of
history. Pakistani children studying in elite English-medium
schools and preparing for their 'O' level examination are
spared this ahistorical view of Syed Ahmad. The mainstream
student, however, receives a picture which, although
composed of familiar biographical details, conveys an
altogether different impression and message.
One part of the message is that Syed Ahmad Khan was

the propounder of the two-nation theory on which Pakistan
is based. 'The entire freedom movement', says the textbook
by Rabbani and Sayyid, 'revolved around the two-nation
theory which was introduced by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan.'
The authors elaborate on this opening remark of the sub-
section on 'Two Nation Theory' by explaining that Syed
Ahmad did not originally believe in this theory, but
arrived at it as a result of his experience. Students are told
that Syed Ahmad, in fact, saw India as one nation, and was
'open-minded', 'large hearted' and a 'staunch patriot'; but
his bitter experience of the Hindus and the Congress
compelled him to change his mind.
According to this text, the 'Congress had turned into
a pure Hindu body and was working on the lines which
would have erased the Muslims completely from the Indian
society as a nation.' Syed Ahmad's recognition of the
irreconcilability of Hindus and Muslims as a result of his
experience, and his failure to bring about a unity between
the two serve as a basis for the second message which is
about the character of Hindu society. Rabbani and Sayyid
find this other message in the working of the Congress
itself. They say that 'the demands that were projected from
the Congress platform appeared very innocent and
democratic but actually were aimed at the complete
elimination of the Muslims from the Indian society'. Other
authors are more direct. For instance, Arshad's textbook
for Sind's Class VIII children says that 'the selfish and
sectarian attitude of the Hindus brought a change in Syed
Ahmad, and he advised the Muslims to stay away from the
Congress.'
It is easy to notice that Syed Ahmad Khan is apparently
no more than a tool in this kind of historiography.
114 Rival Histories
Though verbally represented as a great man, he serves

merely as a means to stigmatize the Congress in the minds
of Pakistani children. The full instrumental value of Syed
Ahmad goes beyond this, for the stigma attached to the
Congress is, in fact, intended to stereotype the Hindus as
a selfish and sectarian people. This extended demonology is
accomplished at the expense of a rational, appreciative
grasp of Syed Ahmad's life and personality. The fact that
his personal experience was based on the specific events in
which he participated, and en his perception of a highly
volatile political climate is something that Pakistani children
studying the kind of books we have cited are not allowed
to see. Ironically, a similar thing happens to children
studying Syed Ahmad's life and work in Indian schools.
They too receive a tailored view of the man-tailored to
suit a different picture of his times. His role is reduced to
supplying a Muslim face in the pantheon of nineteenth-
century reformers. His face enables the pantheon to acquire
a pluralist ambience.
Most Indian textbooks confine their description of
Syed Ahmad's role in history to his educational efforts,
specifically to his attempt to introduce scientific Western
education as a means to weaken the hold of obscurantist
ideas on vast sections of the Muslim population. His
political ideas are mentioned in very few Indian textbooks.
Two such books are the NCERT texts for Classes VIII and
XII. The authors of these texts attempt to accommodate a
brief description of Syed Ahmad's political views within
the short space available for portraying him as a social
reformer and pioneer of modern education among Muslims.
The junior-level text says that 'he believed, like many
other leaders at that time, that Indians were not yet ready
to govern themselves and that their interests would be best
served by remaining loyal to the British rule'. The senior-

level text by Bipan Chandra also takes this line: 'The time
for politics, he said, had not yet come.' However, this text
gives its readers a glimpse of the problem that Syed
Ahmad's life and work poses to the Indian school historian
who wants to give him a place in the nineteenth-century
renaissance: Hindus, Parsis and Christians had contributed
freely to Syed Ahmad's college at Aligarh, the text says,
and reminds us of the fact that out of the seven Indian
teachers serving the college in 1898, two were Hindus, one
being a professor of Sanskrit. The text now proceeds to the
change in Syed Ahmad's attitude: 'However, towards the
end of his life, he began to talk of Hindu domination to
prevent his followers from joining the rising national
movement. This was unfortunate, though basically he was
not a communalist. He only wanted the backwardness of
the Muslim middle and upper classes to go.'
Here onwards, the text meanders around Syed Ahmad's
choices and beliefs, without touching on the dangers he
perceived in representative democracy. His dedication to
his college and the difficulties he faced in running it are
mentioned, to suggest that his political perspective was
shaped mainly by his attempt to protect his college from
his orthodox critics. The text continues along this line to
pass a judgement:
For the same reason, he would not do anything to
offend the government, and, on the other hand,
encouraged communalism and separatism. This was,
of course, a serious political error which was to
have harmful consequences in later years. 7
The suggestion made in this important Indian textbook-
that Syed Ahmad Khan's personality and politics cast a
116 Rival Histories
long shadow on Hindu-Muslim relations-faintly echoes

the claim made in Pakistani textbooks that Syed Ahmad
Khan was the founder of the two-nation theory which
later led to the birth of Pakistan.
The only Pakistani textbook which portrays Syed
Ahmad Khan as a man of his time and desists from giving
him messianic importance is An Illustrated History ofPakistan
by J. Hussain. It is also the only Pakistani text to make a
specific reference to the criticism that Syed Ahmad faced
from orthodox Muslims, including those who advocated
pan-Islamism. We find in this book a rounded account of
the social and political ethos that prevailed in the north-
western area of the subcontinent where Pakistan is situated
today. Its portrayal of Syed Ahmad is remarkably sober
and frank. One is startled to read, for example, that Syed
Ahmad 'probably owed his knighthood to his opposition
to the Indian National Congress'. On the role of Syed
Ahmad Khan in shaping the idea which later inspired the
Pakistan Movement, this carefully crafted text makes an
open-ended point:
In visualising Hindus and Muslims parting company

to put their respective houses in order, Syed Ahmed
revealed a striking premonition of historic
developments leading to the creation of Pakistan. 8
Parties and Politics

The narrative of the freedom struggle goes through a sharp
change of terrain as it moves from 'cultural awakening' to
organized political activity in its coverage of the last part of
the nineteenth century. The shift is no less striking than
the previous one was, from the revolt of 1857 to 'cultural

awakening'. The young readers who want to make sense of
the shift need new conceptual tools. They must know
what terms like 'elites' and 'parties' might mean in the
context of the late nineteenth century, before they can
grasp the idea of an 'electorate' and the demand for a
'separate electorate'. They also need· information about
regional demography, an idea of how educational and
employment opportunities were distributed, and a map of
how far the railways had spread. 9 They need all this in
order to recognize the conditions under which the first
episode of formal political activities in India evolved, and
also the challenges that it faced. School textbooks of both
India and Pakistan deny their readers any access to this
kind of information. Even the senior, seventeen-year-old
students of Class XII find no such background details in
their textbook. They, too, are expected to make the
conceptual leap from cultural awakening to political
organization with nothing more to rely on than faith in
the writer of their textbook. To say that thirteen- or-
seventeen-year-olds cannot decipher a demographic table
or a map would be quite remarkable indeed, considering
the kind of problems they are expected to grasp in their
mathematics or science class.
It is not surprising that, in the absence of any
background material to handle and apply, the student is
left to memorize 'facts', such as th~·date when the Congress
was founded and by whom. Both Indian and Pakistani
children are required to memorize numerous 'facts' of this
kind by way of learning the history of the freedom
struggle in the 'moderate' phase of Congress politics. The
impression given to the child is that the Congress was
'born' or 'set up' one day like an institution or enterprise.
118 Rival Histories
The child must also come to terms with the fact that the
British had a significant role in floating the Congress.
When history takes the form of questions like, 'Who
founded the Congress and in which year?', we can hardly
expect children to grasp the logic behind the emergence of
Congress politics.
It is true that a few authors of Indian and Pakistani
textbooks try to explain the gradual evolution of the
Congress-from the regional and all-India associations formed
earlier, but in the absence of an exposure to other aspects
of post-1857 life in India, especially socio-economic aspects,
the explanation does not make much sense. Interestingly,
it is a Pakistani author who goes farthest in an attempt to
link the appearance of the Congress in the mid-eighties of
the nineteenth century with what had been going on for a
long time before it. Unfortunately, though quite in keeping
with everything else in Pakistani textbooks, this attempt
by Sarwar is terribly brief:
The Congress was not the innovation of one man;
it was not the creation of a few individuals; or even
of a few organizations coming together for a
common purpose. It was the culmination of more
than half a century's labours put in at different
times and in different capacities by men like Raja
Ram Mohan Roy, Dwarkanath Tagore and Kristo
Das Pal; it was the outcome of sustained work
done for decades by .public organizations like the ·
British India Association, the Brahma Samaj and
the Prarthna Samaj. 10
Instead of elaborating on this abstract and somewhat
puzzling account of how the Congress came into being, the
text jumps into a discussion of the partition of Bengal.
Sarwar's text is not alone in practising this kind of quick
movement. Pakistani school historiography is based on a

high degree of selectiveness in the choice of facts. The
choice is inspired by an ideological concern, and it mostly
ends up being arbitrary. At this point, the narrative moves
at a faster pace than the Indian one. The details left out of
the narrative have no apparent relevance for the construction
of Pakistan's national memory.
Naoroji's critique of India's economic exploitation, the
demands made by the moderate leadership of Congress,
and the rise of militant nationalist leaders like Tilak receive
no attention in Pakistani textbooks. Even Hussain's spacious
account bypasses these topics as it traverses the
administrative and economic reforms undertaken by the
British in the areas which now comprise Pakistan. It is
only when she moves to the topic of Bengal's partition that
she finds the need to introduce her readers to 'Hindu anti-
British militancy'. Farooq Bajwa's text admits that it is
'still unclear' whether the British divided Bengal for political
or administrative reasons. His next statement is quite
unique in the entire range of Pakistani accounts of this
period. The immediate reaction of the move to partition
Bengal, Bajwa says, 'divided the Muslims and Hindus
clearly along communal lines'. This is among the highly
rare glimpses that Pakistani children might get from a
textbook about the 'divide and rule' policy of the British.
Indian children, on the contrary, receive frequent
reinforcements regarding the role of this theory, starting
with the formation of the Muslim League itself. The
theory is pressed into service to dispel any possibility of an
impression being formed that there might have been
objective conditions conducive to the application and
splendid success of the 'divide and rule' policy. The UP
state textbook for high school students quotes Elphinstone's
120 Rival Histories
reference to the Roman empire for justifying a divide and

rule policy by the British in India. The book also mentions
the discrimination shown earlier (i.e. after the 1857 revolt)
against Muslim$ in state employment as evidence of a
divisive policy. Like many other texts, the UP textbook
also attempts to reduce the significance · of the Muslim
League by reminding the young reader that nationalist
Muslims continued to join the Congress. Despite this
trend, the text says, Muslims continued to come under an
increasing amount of communal influence. Two reasons
are given for this: one, the feeling among Muslim leaders
belonging to the upper class and the nascent middle class
that their economic interests would be hurt if they opposed
the British; and two, the fears created in their minds by
some of the radical Congress leaders who took a Hindu
revivalist line.
On the face of it, this I
exposition does not look
significantly different from how some of the Pakistani
textbooks describe the creation of the Muslim League.
However, the positive light in which the Pakistani texts
place the birth of Muslim League makes their approach
quite different. Bajwa's text, for instance, talks about the
worrying influence of Hindu revivalist organizations, apart
from the controversy concerning Hindi and Urdu. In
junior-level Pakistani textbooks, the birth of the Muslim
League figures as an event that needs no more justification
than that 'the Muslims of India had no political organization
of their own' (Punjab, Class VIII). Presented in this manner,
the Muslim League steps out of history, assuming the
status and role of a quasi-divine mechanism that the Muslims
of India ·had always needed. Texts written for older children
make ostensible attempts to contextualize the League's
creation. The point that sets their account of the League's
creation sharply apart from the brief mention we find of

this event in Indian texts is the former's denial of any
British interest or role in widening the Hindu-Muslim gap.
Pakistani texts present the formation of the League as the
culmination of earlier efforts for social and political
awakening. After the Hindu opposition to the partition of
Bengal, the Pakistani narrative suggests, Muslims could no
more entertain the illusion that the Hindu majority would
give them a fair treatment. The Pakistani narrative of
freedom structurally depends in its coverage of this period
on portraying the Congress as a Hindu organization from
the beginning and on highlighting Muslim support for the
partition of Bengal.
It is hardly surprising that we find absolutely no trace
of Jinnah in Pakistani textbooks at this point. One can
imagine that his participation in the 1906 session of the
Congress held in Calcutta can hardly be included in the
Pakistani account without causing serious damage to the
narrative structure at the sensitive point where it announces
the birth of the Muslim League. Jinnah had helped Dadabhai
Naoroji draft his presidential speech for this session, which
called the partition of Bengal 'a bad blunder for England'. 11
Suppression of such inconvenient facts, pertaining to the
early phase of the political career of the founder of Pakistan,
is as crucial for sustaining the Pakistani master narrative of
freedom as the construction of a unified, homogenized
Muslim political plank. This second imperative implies
that textbooks cannot talk about the social origins of the
men who took the Simla Deputation and their readiness to
let the British pursue their divisive strategies in Bengal and
elsewhere. Bajwa's textbook, as an exceptional case, goes
against this narrative logic when it explains why the British
were not hostile to the League:
122 Rival Histories
A party led by landlords and princes could hardly

threaten the British with any physical force and
was obviously going to act as a buffer between the
British and the Muslims, as well as a constant
reminder to the Congress that they had to take
Muslim views into account. 12
Perhaps this explanation is too short to disturb Bajwa's
own narrative, but we must appreciate the remarkable
effort his textbook makes to relieve school history from
the grip of narratology, and not just from the strain of a
national ideology. By citing the social origins of the League,
this text draws children's attention to the ironical advantage
the League enjoyed from the beginning in negotiating with
the British.
The Indian narrative too faces a strain in its coverage
of the swadeshi movement in Bengal. British objectives in
dividing Bengal are established quite forcefully, and the
narrative moves on smoothly to portray the anti-Partition
campaign in a nationalist framework. The coverage of the
mass upsurge foreshadows descriptions of the Gandhi era
of the nationalist struggle. The character that the narrative
had acquired while covering the 1857 revolt is now
reinforced, with the added feature of a democratic ethos
surrounding the upsurge this time. School historians seem
so committed to this character of the narrative that they do
not refer even vaguely to the social origins of the leadership
of boycott and swadeshi in Bengal. Nor are they able to
show how the ethos facilitated the divisive designs of the
British. Even the NCERT textbooks are unable to explain
to the young reader the landlord-peasant contradiction
which shaped the anti-partition movement. They offer no
perspective to the student about the use of the term
'nationalists' in the context of this movement. The Muslim
response to the movement is greatly minimized, and

portrayed to suggest that it was fully shaped by the British.
It is hardly surprising that these writers ignore Rabindranath
Tagore's criticism of the social distance between the
landlords and the peasants and his point that 'Satan cannot
enter till he finds a flaw.' 13
It is quite remarkable how narrow a space is available
in the Indian narrative of this early episode of the freedom
movement for discussing Hindu-Muslim relations and the
development of Muslim politics. The case of S. Roy's
textbook for high schools in West Bengal illustrates the
problem in the extreme. This text permits the narrative to
proceed as far as the Lucknow Pact of 1916 before finding
a few lines to bring the reader up to date with the
trajectory of communal relations and Muslim politics. At
the beginning of the long discussion of the partition of
Bengal and revolutionary politics, this book refers to
religious demography. It quotes Tara Chand's History of the
Freedom Movement in India to reinforce the point that the
division of Bengal was not a response to the Muslim
demand or a strategy to improve the backward state of
Muslims in the eastern part of Bengal. After this mention,
the author virtually forgets about Muslim politics and
communal harmony for some thirty pages during which
the student is given an elaborate exposure to the protest
against partition, the politics of the radical leaders in the
Congress, the split in the Congress, the activities of
revolutionaries, and then, in a new chapter, the arrival of
Gandhi and his Champaran struggle. Finally, when it is
time to explain the Lucknow Pact under a separate heading,
the writer recalls the need to tell the students about the
formation of a party called the Muslim League. Apparently,
the League and the demand for a separate electorate are not
124 Rival Histories
integral to the narrative this textbook presents to Bengal's

high school students today. A tacit elimination of the
Muslim story occurs at the structural level, marking advance
acceptance of the creation of East ~akistan in 1947. Since
the discussion of the Lucknow Pact requires a mention of
the League's creation, it is now mentioned post-facto as an
isolated historical fact.
The separation of the League's story from the main
narrative of India's freedom is a common feature in school
textbooks, and we shall see it continuing all the way to the
1940s when it becomes impossible to keep the two stories
apart. The reluctance that Indian school historians display
in accommodating even the early part of the League's story
in the main narrative of nationalism is hard to explain
purely in terms of the logistics of narration. If that was the
difficulty, at least one textbook would have overcome it.
Perin Bagli's textbook for ICSE students is graphically
designed to accommodate many different strands -of the
narrative. With the help of pictures, box items and
highlighted portions within the text, this superbly printed
textbook succeeds in accommodating a greater variety of
information in the main narrative than any other Indian
textbook does. But even this text tells the story of the
Muslim League in a separate chapter. Shorter than any
other chapter, its four-page account of the League's birth
presses the fast-forward button in order to let the student
know, while studying the events of 1906, what the League
eventually did from 1940 onwards. The fifteen-year-old
reader is given no choice: Bagli's text demands a package
acceptance of why the League was created, how it grew,
and how it succeeded in getting what it wanted. The
manner in which the past, the present and the future
collapse into one in this construction of knowledge about
the League is strikingly similar to the timelessness which

Pakistani textbooks assign to the idea of Pakistan. The
judgement implied in this Indian text is, of course, different,
but the perspective is identical with what we find in
Pakistani texts. The judgement is that the League symbolized
a British conspiracy from the beginning; it ultimately
succeeded because of 'the collective Muslim desire for
power and seeming reluctance to live under those whom
they had once governed'. The representation of Muslims
and Hindus as two collective entities also echoes the master
narrative we find in Pakistani textbooks.
8
Unity and Break-Up
After 1857, we have to move as far forward as 1916 to

find another episode in the story of India's freedom struggle
which represents the triumph of Hindu-Muslim unity. The
year 1916 thus forms a pleasant mid-point in the narrative
of freedom, marking the beginning of a short-lived process
of communal harmony and joint endeavour to throw the
British out. The brief chapter of communal harmony
which opened in 1916 is also significant for the appearance
of Mahatma Gandhi. The early 1920s present Gandhi at his
glorious best, so to say, in the context of the task he had
selected as the highest challenge of his life. Never before,
and never again, was colonized India _going to look so self-
assured and relieved of internal tension as it did in the
three years from 1919 to 1922.
Quick on the heels of the achievement of the Congress-
League unity in 1916 and its impressive exercise in the
Unity and Break-Up 127
Khilafat campaign and the Non-cooperation Movement

came the confusion and frustration of the post-Chauri
Chaura years. Gandhi's decision to withdraw his first great
initiative was, according to most historical accounts, a
political error, an act of personal whimsy on the part of
history's greatest idealist. In purely chronological terms, it
marked the beginning of a period of political disarray and
social turmoil. Developments in Turkey made Khilafat
redundant, and this too made a significant contribution to
the confusion and desperation in Muslim leadership,
especially in the newly activated leadership of the ulema.
As a parallel process, mobilization of the urban, newly
risen middle class of northern India around symbols of
Hindu revivalism made significant political strides. The
devolution of democratic responsibilities and powers by
the British under the auspices of the Montague-Chelmsford
reforms heightened the urgency to win people over. Each
step taken towards democratizing local spaces led to
increasingly greater anxiety and tension in Hindu-Muslim
relations.
The Indian school narrative of the period following the
Lucknow Pact is marked by some of the most horrifying
instances of British repression. First, we hear about
Champaran, where Gandhi undertook his first experiment
of non-violent satyagraha against the cruel practice of
forced production of indigo. Then comes the mass shooting
of Jallianwalla Bagh in April 1919. No other incident in
the history of British colonial domination presents the
same mixture of callous tyranny and victimization that the
Jallianwallah massacre does. Another scene of repressive
state violence in Punjab that belongs to this period is the
Lahore demonstration against the Simon Commission.
Lala Lajpat Rai was killed as a result of the injury he
128 Rival Histories
received in this demonstration, and Saunders, who was

responsible for the lathi charge, was killed later by Bhagat
Singh and his associates. The Khilafat and Non-cooperation
Movements too witnessed state repression on a large scale,
in retaliation against the organized resistance of the Raj by
ordinary people and their leaders.
The periodization followed in most Pakistani textbooks
runs from 1907 to 1927. By contrast, Indian textbooks
generally select the year 1919 as a marker of historical time
which shaped the course of the freedom struggle until the
mid-1930s. This contrast in periodization is not difficult to
explain. As the state textbook for Class VIII in UP explains,
the period stretching from 1919 to 1947 is regarded as the
'Gandhi era' of the Indian nationalist struggle. The fourteen-
year period falling between 1919 and 1935 forms the first
phase of this era. The UP text says: 'in the Congress
convention of 1919 Tilak announced: "Now Gandhi will
show the nation's path and he will be our future leader."
Thus, in 1919 the rein of the national movement came into
Gandhi's hands. He transformed the nature of this
movement.' This commentary is representative of a
consensus in Indian school historiography. In a number of
textbooks, the years following 1919 are structured around
Gandhi's personality and activities. In Pakistani textbooks,
on the other hand, the historical phase following the
formation of the Muslim League in 1907 concludes in 1927
when Jinnah presented his 'fourteen points' in response to
the Nehru Report. This period forms, according to
Hussain's textbook, a phase of 'more hope and more
disillusionment'. The period starting from 1927 is portrayed
in Pakistani textbooks as the time when the idea of
Pakistan crystallized.
This difference in periodization has obvious implications
for the shape of the larger narrative of the freedom struggle.

It also has implications for the manner in which the
teaching of history at school is expected to meet the
objective of nation-building by training the young citizen's
mind. From the Indian school historian's point of view,
the arrival of Gandhi, with a great reputation earned in
South Africa, marks the point at which the struggle for
freedom went through a transformation. Ways to
characterize the transformation may differ, but certain
broad tendencies, which surfaced in the struggle from here
onwards, have been identified in both professionally written
histories and in school textbooks. One is the broadening of
the national movement in terms of the participation of the
peasantry and the urban working classes, as well as of
different regions of the subcontinent. In other words, the
freedom movement became more inclusive from here on.
The instrument by which Gandhi appears to have
made it more inclusive gave the movement a moral
character-a counterpoint to the moral influence that the
British had perceived as their job to exercise as colonial
masters of a backward people. 1 Gandhi's chosen instrument
was non-violence, which he believed was best suited to
pursue the truth underlying India's right to be free of
British rule. It had an inward application too, with reference
to India's social fabric which sanctioned the oppressive
custom of untouchability. In view of this .wide sweep of
concerns that Gandhi's leadership enabled the freedom
movement to embrace, his first major experiment with
non-violent civil disobedience gives 1919 an obvious
significance_ for the Indian school historian. The fact that
this first experiment was said to have been hastily called off
by Gandhi himself, and that the calling off led to grim
consequences, do not detract from its significance as the
130 Rival Histories
turning point of a story whose hero is now identified.

Indeed, the decision to 'call off' the movement might show
how much authority Gandhi wielded as a hero.
Since Gandhi's status as a hero does not apply in the
case of Pakistani textbooks, we can hardly be surprised by
the greatly reduced significance these books give to the
year 1919. Pakistan's school history-textbooks are no less
herocentric th-an India's, but for the Pakistani school
historian, Gandhi does not have the stature of a hero. A
few textbooks present him as a major Congress leader, but
the characterization is inevitably that of a 'Hindu leader'.
Gandhi's biography, his arrival from South Africa and the
main tenets of his philosophy of action, which most Indian
textbooks discuss briefly at the beginning of the 1919-1935
period, find no place in Pakistani textbooks. Pakistani texts
are mostly able to efface or at least greatly reduce the
significance of Gandhi's entry into the politics of the
subcontinent because these textbooks are constructed around
a teleological notion of history.
The tendency to follow the arrow of time strictly in
terms of the target which it eventually struck makes it
impossible for textbook writers to notice the difficulties of
comprehension and the prejudice that colours the historical
narrative implicit in this technique. The fact that in 1919
the freedom of Pakistan depended as much on the issues on
which India's freedom depended does not seem obvious to
Pakistan's school historians. Their narrative appears to
take cognizance of events and forces that ultimately led to
freedom only to the extent that they facilitated the
formation of Pakistan. Since 'freedom' is linked with the
creation of Pakistan, the forces that worked for freedom at
a time when Pakistan was not conceived are not given a
high value. The long period from 1907 to 1927 marks a
spell of uncertainty and expectation for the Pakistani

school historians, who claim to perceive this period from
the perspective of the Muslims of India living during those
decades. It is in the subsequent period that the uncertainty
is said to diminish, with the discord over the Nehru
Report and Jinnah's assertion of his fourteen points. It is
in that phase that the Pakistani narrative finds a hero.
The differences in periodization notwithstanding, certain
events figure in both sets of texts, though they are described
from different perspectives and given different weightage.
The Khilafat movement and the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre
are two such events. Both can be said to have shaped the
course of events to come, though in rather different ways.
Let us look at Khilafat first. For the Indian school historian,
the Khilafat marks the high point of Hindu-Muslim unity
and hence the triumph of secularism as a guiding value of
the nationalist movement. The senior-level NCERT text
calls the Khilafat Movement a 'new stream' in the national
movement. The UP textbook for Class VIII says that
Gandhi saw the insult inflicted on Muslims by the
denigration of the Khalifa of Turkey as an insult to
Hindus. Both the senior- and the middle-level UP texts list
this wrong done to Muslims as one of the two reasons for
Gandhi's Non-cooperation Movement, the other one being
the wrongs done in Punjab in the wake of the Rowlatt Act.
The fact that Muslims took part in the Non-cooperation
Movement on a big scale on account of the Khilafat issue
gives it the status of a major and successful experiment in
Gandhi's politics of values. The middle-level NCERT text
which does not follow the usual periodization, and carries
a much longer and more vivid account of the early 1920s
than any other book, says that 'the movement on the
Khilafat question soon merged with the movement against
132 Rival Histories
tµe repression in Punjab and for Swaraj.' Bipan Chandra's

NCERT text for Class VIII says that senior Congress
leaders like Tilak and Gandhi saw the Khilafat agitation as
a 'golden opportunity for cementing Hindu-Muslim unity
and bringing the Muslim masses into the national
movement'. This text adds:
They realised that different sections of the people-
Hindu, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians, capitalists
and workers, peasants and artisans, women and
youth, and tribes and peoples of different regions-
would come into the national movement through
the experience of fighting for their own different
demands and seeing that_ the alien regime stood in
opposition to them. 2
Khilafat in Pakistani Textbooks

This representation of the Khilafat Movement, and the
manner in which it became part of the larger Non-
cooperation Movement under Gandhi's leadership, make
for an interesting comparison with the Pakistani textbooks'
version of this period. Since most textbooks used for
'Pakistan Studies' are organized around specific events
indicated by subtitles, they do not need to provide a clear
narrative format which might necessitate linking of events
as an attempt to explain how or why one event was
followed by another. Moreover, several textbooks provide
extremely brief and sketchy accounts of the period preceding
the 1930s. Errors in the dating of events like the Lucknow
Pact and the Khilafat Movement also abound. These have
been listed and elaborately discussed by Aziz. 3 For our
present purpose, the interesting question is how the
confluence of Non-cooperation and Khilafat is explained.

Most of the Pakistani textbooks present Khilafat in the
foreground of events taking place at the turn of the decade.
They also discuss the Hijrat Movement which the Indian
textbooks ignore.
The Punjab state textbook for high school notes that
the three movements-the Khilafat, the Hijrat and the
Non-cooperation-'are remarkable for the fact that the
Muslims and Hindus worked jointly for their success'. The
book says that this unity could not continue because 'the
hostile attitude of the Hindus towards the Muslims became
evident.' In the next sentence the text jumps to the
publication of the Nehru Report in 1928, apparently as
evidence of the charge made in the previous sentence. This
text does not identify Gandhi as the leader of the Non-
cooperation Movement. After mentioning the genesis of
the Khilafat Movement, it says: 'When the Khilafat
movement was in full swing certain leaders advised the
people not to cooperate with the English.' The text then
goes on to mention the salient steps taken under the
auspices of the Non-cooperation Movement without once
mentioning Gandhi.
A deeper understanding of the Pakistani view of the
Khilafat Movement can be acquired from Bajwa's text. Its
treatment of the Khilafat tries to explain, as no other
textbook in either country does, the dilemma of the Indian
Muslims in psychological terms. 'During the war,' Bajwa
says, 'the Muslims in India could not openly declare their
allegiance to another monarch, but could, and did, claim to
follow a religious obligation to the Caliph.' The precision
of this logic is impressive enough to distract the reader
quite summarily from the problem of wondering whether
the Muslims of India were a single, unified voice. A couple
of pages later this text summarizes the Khilafat experience
134 Rival Histories
as being the first one to show to many Muslims that it was

possible to 'mobilise the community for a cause'. In the
discussion quoted earlier, however, the dilemma and the
logic of Muslim thinking appear to arise out of a pre-
existing solidarity. The text also mentions the difficulties
that this supposed solidarity created for the British who
needed Muslim troops for the war against the Ottoman
empire. On account of the Muslim anxiety for the Caliphate,
the text suggests, the British 'could not be sure of the
dedication of these troops'.
More interesting is Bajwa's reference to Gandhi in the
context of Khilafat and Non-cooperation. Bajwa is the
only Pakistani school historian to introduce Gandhi by
making a reference to his professional background as 'a
British-trained barrister'. The text says that Gandhi was at
this time an unofficial leader of the Congress party though
he was its 'most influential figure'. Despite its overall
liberal tone and discursive style, this text introduces children
to the historical fact of Congress support for Khilafat by
first saying: 'It is obvious that no Hindu could be seriously
concerned with whether the Khilafat was to survive or
not.' This remark proceeds, after undermining the political
sincerity of the Congress in its support for Khilafat, to say
that the Congress 'cleverly decided to use Muslim agitation
to press the British for further concessions for self-rule and
to show the Muslims that the Hindu-Muslim unity was
beneficial'. 4
The attribution of motives is not uncommon in history
writing; here we see it used to reinforce the message that
the Muslims of India were victims of manipulation. Gandhi
is not spared in this logic of motive-attribution. While the
Congress 'cleverly used' the Muslim agitation, Gandhi
'publicly declared his support for the Khilafat Movement
and also requested that Muslims should join the Congress

in seeking the goal of Swaraj or self-rule'. Gandhi's support
for Khilafat falls in sharp contrast, at the end of this
paragraph-long discussion, with Jinnah's opposition to the
demand for self-rule on the ground that it was premature
at this stage. The text does not tell the students that Jinnah
was opposed to Khilafat as well. This informatioO: is
perhaps withheld to guard against the impression that
Jinnah was not concerned about a cause that had stirred
Muslim feelings so deeply. This is how Jinnah's image as a
leader of Muslims is constructed, against the background of
a period when Jinnah perceived himself as a secular leader,
dedicated to the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity.
In this narrative, followed with minor variations in
most other Pakistani textbooks, the Khilafat Movement
becomes the dominant story of 1919-22, overshadowing
the Non-cooperation Movement or rather, subsuming it.
At the time of the second Khilafat conference held at
Amritsar in December 1919, Bajwa's text says, the Congress
and the Muslim League also met in Amritsar and chose
Gandhi as the leader of 'these three parties in their common
objectives'. Hussain's textbook is more accurate when it
says that only the Majlis-i-Khilafat and the Congress met in
Amritsar and gave a united call to renounce British titles,
and to boycott British-run institutions and goods. This text
also notes that Jinnah and the Nawab of Mahmudabad
objected to the 'unconstitutionality of this movement', and
also that Jinnah resigned from the Congress in 1920.
It is hardly surprising that in the highly compressed
version of events prepared for the relatively younger
children of Class VIII in Punjab, the Non-cooperation
Movement disappears altogether from the narrative of the
period. This omission, seen against the cursory treatment
136 Rival Histories
offered in the senior-level Pakistani texts, suggests that the

Non-cooperation Movement does not quite fit in the
national narrative of the birth of Pakistan. Khilafat, on the
other hand, fits well, not only for the reason that it
invokes a pan-Islamic scenario, but also because it presents
the opportunity to represent Gandhi in a poor light. We
have already seen how this is done in a relatively more
liberal account given by Bajwa. In a flamboyant textbook
like Rabbani and Sayyid's, Gandhi's decision to support
the Khilafat becomes an example of his shrewdness as a
politician as he 'had planned to use the Khilafat agitation'
to pressure the government for independence. Rabbani and
Sayyid go on to say: 'Whether the Muslims won or lost on
the Khilafat issue was immaterial to Gandhi, what mattered
was the purpose the movement could be made to serve.'
This text, criticized in Pakistan for its rabid enthusiasm,
offers in this case merely a somewhat more wordy edition
of a common version. Gandhi's shrewdness, his outward
simplicity and humility, and his great appeal to the Hindus
are components of the staple image he has in the Pakistani
master narrative of the freedom struggle. This image is held
together by the impression he made, of being both unreliable
and whimsical when he suspended the Non-cooperation
Movement after the incident at Chauri Chaura in 1922.
Bajwa's text presents this episode as being of a decisive
nature in shaping Muslim intentions to organize themselves
instead of looking for allies. Interestingly, this text is
misleading in using the term 'Swaraj movement' in place of
'non-cooperation movement'. 'Gandhi decided that the
Swaraj movement was becoming too violent and called off
the attempt to remove the British' (emphasis added). This
gives the impression that Gandhi was no longer interested
in Swaraj. Even if unintended, it is an important mistake,
for it clears the way for. Jinnah to be presented here

onwards as the greater leader of the freedom struggle.
Gandhi's abrupt response to the Chauri Chaura incident
and his subsequent arrest, which Hussain notes, 'was
without undue commotion either from the populace at
large, or from the Congress party', displace him from that
centre of the saga of Pakistan's freedom into which his
support for Khilafat had temporarily inserted him.
Gandhi in Indian Textbooks

In Pakistani textbooks there is no mention of Gandhi's
personality, the values he upheld and promoted, and the
inventive character of his politics. In most textbooks he is
presented as just another Hindu politician. The Indian
textbooks, which do pause for a paragraph to introduce
Gandhi to children, also represent his personality and ideas
in a sketchy manner. School historians seem to assume that
for children to appreciate Gandhi's contribution to the
politics of the freedom movement, a brief acquaintance
with his emphasis on non-violence and truth may be quite
sufficient. The following discussion of these values figures
in the NCERT textbook for Class XII:
The ideal Satyagrahi was to be truthful and perfectly

peaceful, but at the same time he would refuse to
submit to what he considered wrong. He would
accept suffering willingly in the course of struggle
against the wrong-doer. The struggle was to be part
of his love of truth. But even while resisting evil,
he would love the evil-doer. Hatred would be alien
to the nature of a true Satyagrahi. He would,
moreover, be utterly fearless. 5
138 Rival Histories
The text goes on in this fashion, enumerating Gandhi's

ideals and beliefs, such as his insistence on harmony between
thought and action, and his faith in the power of common
people. The subsection 'Gandhi and Ideals', where this
introduction to Gandhi occurs, forms a short, independent
essay which provides a handy preface to the Champaran
satyagraha-Gandhi's first experiment in India after his
South African training. The Class VIII NCERT text refers
to the Champaran struggle after a short paragraph of a
hundred words on Gandhi's birth, his work in South
Africa and his main values. The paragraph concludes by
saying that satyagraha is 'basically a non-violent method of
fighting oppression'.
These two examples are representative of the manner
in which Gandhi is introduced in Indian school history.
There is no doubt that history textbooks make an exception
in the case of Gandhi by pausing the flow of the historical
narrative to mention biographical facts like the date and
place of his birth, and his work in South Africa. Seen in
the context of the NCERT policy on the history curriculum,
Gandhi constitutes a unique case, for the policy emphasizes
the discussion of 'forces, institutions and movements' in
preference to 'biographical details of individual
administrators and leaders' .6
The exception made for Gandhi is singular, for, we do
not find a discussion of the philosophical or moral beliefs
of any other personality, not even Tagore. The symbolic
significance of the exceptional treatment given to Gandhi
is obvious: it gives _him a unique status. This being self-
evident, we can ask the question whether the treatment
given to Gandhi prepares children for comprehending and
appreciating his role in the freedom struggle. The question
is relevant because soon after the appearance of Gandhi on
the Indian political scene in 1915, all major events of a

political nature require the young student to view them
from Gandhi's perspective, in the context of his ideals and
values. What Gandhi approves and what he rejects, the
timing of a launch as well as its withdrawal or termination,
are supposed to be of critical importance in the progress of
the Indian master narrative of the freedom movement.
Since he is represented as the hero of this story, his
motivation, his philosophy and logic need to be understood
as the basis for the appreciation of his actions.
It goes without saying that non-violence and truth, the
two highest ideals which Gandhi upheld throughout his
political career, are embedded in a complex structure of
ideas that inspired him. It may be argued that thirteen- to
seventeen-year-old readers cannot be expected to grasp
these ideals more than nominally. Such an argument might
suggest that non-violence has a somewhat better chance of
being understood than truth, because the former has a
more limited range of meaning. Similarly, it may be argued
that terms like 'oppression' and 'resistance', 'suffering' and
'evil', which have been used in the NCERT text quoted
earlier, can only be understood by children in an everyday
sense, as opposed to a historical and political sense in
which they relate to Gandhi's contribution to the Indian
freedom movement. Faced with these arguments, we need
to ask: is a nominal understanding of these ideals adequate
for appreciating Gandhi's political leadership? More
crucially, we should ask: do these ideals constitute the
main elements of Gandhi's role in the history of the
freedom movement? We can recognize three broad
dimensions in this role: one, Gandhi as a mass leader who
widened the social base of the Congress party; two, Gandhi
as an imaginative strategist; and three, as a social reformer
who widened the scope of politics itself.
140 Rival Histories
Indian textbooks touch upon all these three dimensions

of Gandhi's role in the history of the freedom movement,
but they fail to establish a continuity across them. Most of
the time, it is Gandhi's name and personality that the
school historians invoke when they refer to one of these
dimensions. At different points in the narrative the school
historians remind the young reader that the course of
future events was shaped by Gandhi's intention, his response
and feelings. Certain events are described and explained
entirely in terms of Gandhi's intentions. The young reader
is simply never given a rational explanation of the choice
Gandhi made or the factors-including his own concerns
and the advice from others-that guided his judgement and
action. He comes across as a charismatic figure whose ways
were somewhat whimsical and unpredictable, though at
times highly imaginative.
How Gandhi attained his status in the Congress and
his moral authority among the masses remains a mystery
and we can guess why this should be so. School textbooks
do not ever discuss Gandhi's political philosophy which
rejects the state as a point of reference for the citizen's
ethical judgement. No Indian text mentions that Gandhi
substituted the value of loyalty to the state's laws with a
self-imposed structure of moral behaviour. He asked people
to violate the law while staying accountable to the truth of
their own conscience. This axiom of Gandhi's anarchism is
either deliberately or inadvertently ignored. What we find
instead is a piecemeal Gandhi who has a genius for
mobilizing people, but whose choices remain inexplicable.
It is possible that a coherently portrayed Gandhi is not
a priority of the Indian school historian. It is equally
possible that a portrayal based on Gandhi's anarchism
would be inconsistent with the stated educational aim of
training children for citizenship. A commonly held notion

of this training makes it synonymous with loyalty to a
centralist state. The fact that Gandhi was acting in the
context of colonial rule does not appear quite sufficient as
a safeguard against the possibility that the young readers of
present-day school books might draw implications of
Gandhi's philosophy and action in a decontextualized
manner. Perhaps there is also an assumption that the
school-going student is too young to understand political
ideas and their expression in the life and work of an
individual leader. There is no psychological ground to
support this apprehension, but the possibility that it guides
the school historian to present Gandhi as a great leader
with fragmented, unconnected facets cannot be denied.
No event brings out a whimsical, obstinate and self-
righteous image of Gandhi more sharply than his decision
to call off the Non-cooperation Movement after the Chauri
Chaura incident. Every textbook uses roughly the same
words to explain what happened: the violence of Chauri
Chaura disturbed Gandhi so much that he decided to
withdraw the Non-cooperation Movement. Textbooks seem
to have no room for an explanation or debate on Gandhi's
motive or compulsions, nor do they discuss what kind of
authority Gandhi wielded in the Congress party in this
early phase of his political career in India. To gain a deeper
understanding of the school historian's choices and
limitations, let us take a brief look at other sources. The
fact that the nationalist movement entered a lull after
Gandhi's call for withdrawal in February 1922, and that his
arrest the next month did not trigger a popular protest
provide sufficient evidence to say that the India of 1922
was far from any major, historical turn. We can easily
mistake Gandhi's leadership as being a revolutionary one
142 Rival Histories
even though, as Sarkar says, 'he had given repeated and

ample warning that he was prepared to lead only a specific
type of controlled mass movement. ' 7
Louis Fischer's account gives us a glimpse of Gandhi's
perception of the Chauri Chaura incident:
The news of the atrocity reached Gandhi on 8
February, and it made him sick and sad. Violence
upset him physically and psychologically. 'No
provocation', he exclaimed, 'can possibly justify
brutal murder of men who had been rendered
defenceless and who had virtually thrown
themselves to the mercy of the mob.'
It was a 'bad augury'.
'Suppose', he asked, 'the non-violent disobedience
of Bardoli was permitted by God to succeed and
the Government had abdicated in favour of the
victims of Bardoli, who would control the unruly
elements that must be expected to perpetrate
inhumanity upon due provocation?' He was not
sure that he could. 8
Juxtaposed with the Bardoli resolution of the Congress
Working Committee, Fischer's account enables us to
appreciate the contradictory nature of the forces Gandhi
was dealing with. R. Palme Dutt's analysis of the Bardoli
resolution shows that the consequences of non-payment of
land revenue and rent were as major a source of Gandhi's
anxiety as the fear of manifest violence. 9 This statement of
Gandhi gives us a view of his mind that no textbook does.
Such an insight and the possibility of a debate on the ethos
of 1922 are apparently not considered necessary and relevant
to the teaching of history at school. It is quite possible that
such a debate is regarded as being beyond the capacities of

school-children or that school teachers are regarded as
being incapable of engaging in such a debate. Textbook
authors clearly prefer sweeping remarks to a nuanced
debate. The Punjab textbook says, for example, that Gandhi
'ordered the non-cooperation movement to be stopped
immediately!' The Tamil Nadu textbook for Class VIII
says that 'in Kerala, 2000 peasants were arrested, when a
mob burnt the police at Chauri Chaura'. In the case of this
kind of confusion of geography and sequence, perhaps the
text writers expect the teacher to step in to help and
correct the factual and inferential mistakes children might
make when examined. In another quick couple of sentences
the book tells children what happened next: 'Gandhiji
suspended the non-cooperation movement. He was arrested
and sentenced to six years imprisonment.' The sentence
seems to suggest that Gandhi was arrested for suspending
the movement.
The use of brief, quiz-like answers to simple questions
in recently published textbooks are indicative of the impact
of television and the changes taking place in the examination
system. Unlike the old pattern, the new approach expects
children to give brief answers to objective questions.
Sometimes, the answer required is just a word or a number.
For instance, after reading the sentences quoted earlier,
children might be asked: 'For how many years was Gandhiji
imprisoned after the Non-cooperation Movement?'
Simultaneity of events and their geography appear to
get no attention at all from the writers of most textbooks.
They move freely across the map of India, juxtaposing
incidents happening in different places in one sweeping
sentence after another. The Gujarat state textbook, for
instance, gives us the following description of what
144 Rival Histories
happened in February 1922: 'To start the no-tax movement

in Bardoli district, Gandhiji himself went to Bardoli. Before
the collective non-violence movement began, the police
fired at a procession in Chauri Chaura, a village near
Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh.' Then, after a brief description
of what happened in Chauri Chaura, the text says: 'Under
the direction of Gandhiji the Congress Working Committee
postponed the struggle and continued their constructive
programmes.' Between the withdrawal of the struggle and
the continuation of the constructive programme, the young
reader is allowed no breather to take in the momentous
nature of the first decision. The text moves on in its flat,
all-embracing style: 'So, the people were disappointed.
Certain national leaders criticised the decision of postponing
the struggle.' 10
Apart from being pedagogically unsound and crude,
the summary attribution of Gandhi's snap decision to call
off the N ~:m-cooperation Movement to his commitment to
non-violence is historically untrue as well. His patience
with the ulema, who dominated the Khilafat, was running
out. Mushirul Hasan says that by the end of 1921, Gandhi
could have been under no illusion about the much-publicized
unity between Muslim leaders of the Khilafat and some of
the Hindu politicians of the Congress. 11 He did not attend
the Karachi Khilafat Conference held in July 1921,
apparently because he anticipated unacceptably flamboyant
pronouncements to be made. On the other hand, Gandhi
was deeply disturbed by the Moplah killings in September
and by the violence that broke out during the protest
against the arrival of the Prince of Wales at Bombay in
November that year. It needs little imagination to appreciate
why no Indian school textbook mentions the Moplah
riots, and why every Pakistani textbook does. The mention
of the Moplah violence would seem to spoil the web of

Hindu-Muslim unity that Indian textbooks weave against
the background of Gandhi's first experiment of satyagraha.
Textbooks make Gandhi's response to the Chauri
Chaura incident look far more sudden than it really was by
exaggerating the success of Non-cooperation and Khilafat.
In his political biography of Gandhi, Nanda recalls that
after the Bombay violence that took place on the arrival of
the Prince of Wales, Gandhi had said that the non-violence
of the non-cooperators had been worse than the violence
of the cooperators. 12 Gandhi said: 'The Swaraj that I have
witnessed during the last two days has stunk in my
nostrils.' Gandhi's awareness of what Mushirul Hasan calls
'the patchy success' of the movement, combined with his
discomfort with the postures the ulema had taken in the
context of Khilafat, apparently led him to see Chauri
Chaura as an opportunity to backtrack. Hasan says: 'The
old postures seemed irrelevant, and the suspension of civil
disobedience suddenly became a political necessity. ' 13 The
impression that school textbooks give to the young reader
is a far cry from this. They suggest that Gandhi's first act
of national leadership had been a stunning success, and that
like a truly great hero he had displayed his commitment to
an ideal, in preference to taking full political advantage of
his success, when he suspended the movement.
Several pedagogical and psychological dimensions of
historiography for children are relevant to this discussion.
The necessity of avoiding jarring details of an episode can
arise both out of the need to keep the narration simple so
that children can grasp it, and from the desire to reinforce
its desired moral appeal. One suspects that the latter
applies to the portrayal of the 1919-22 events in Indian
textbooks. We see in the neat portrayal of this period the
146 Rival Histories
same ideological instinct at work that we saw in the

context of the 1857 rebellion. The instinct is to present
secularism as an innate value of the Indian nationalist
movement. This instinct enables the school historian to
keep communal ideas and activities separate from the main
narrative of the freedom struggle. Ultimately, the instinct
allows the text writers to show the demand for Pakistan as
a sudden and ahistorical development, an aq of manoeuvre
on the part of Jinnah and the British. The approach
logically leads to the use of history teaching at school for
the political aim of discrediting Pakistan. Its legitimacy as
a product of the freedom struggle stands circumscribed due
to the textbook writers' manoeuvre in constructing and
packaging all major episodes since 1857 in a wrapper of
secular nationalism. The children who study these textbooks
are prevented from realizing that the freedom struggle
constituted a pervasive contest among rival value-positions.14
In this matter the children of India and Pakistan have
something in common, although the specific politics of
values they confront unawares is quite different in the two
countries. If good pedagogy is supposed to make children
think for themselves, the textbooks of both countries
make the practice of such a pedagogy difficult, though in
different ways. In Pakistan, the policy of 'Islamization'
implies a general discouragement of individual questioning
of state ideology. In India, the state's commitment to
rationality and secularism-as opposed to the politics of
identity-building-gives the impression that independent
thinking will be encouraged. School textbooks obstruct
this possibility by presenting ideologically tailored content.
Even if the ideology upheld by the designers of this
content is that of secular rationality, the content itself
cannot encourage rational inquiry because it does not let
children see the different dimensions of a historical

happening. Gandhi's representation in the context of the
early 1920s offers an example of this problem. Gandhi is
denied all honour and stature in the portrayal of Khilafat
and Non-cooperation in all Pakistani textbooks. In India,
he is cleverly portrayed to ensure that the politician in him
is left out: only the Mahatma remains. As captive audiences,
children of neither country are allowed the opportunity to
appreciate the enormous challenge he faced in bringing
Hindus and Muslims closer together.
The Difficult Years

The years following the end of Non-cooperation and
Khilafat present a new kind of challenge to the textbook
narrators of the story of freedom. The challenge arises
from the allegorical character of the narrative already
established. As a genre, the Indian narrative of freedom
now arouses the expectation that the thrill of a mass, moral
upsurge will continue, reinforcing the impression that
rational secularism was invincible. At the same time, the
narrators must also act as chroniclers, which means that
they must account for the passage of time between one
dramatic event and the next.
The mid-1920s constitute precisely one such interlude
between dramatic events. In the period preceding the
arrival of the Simon Commission in 1927, Indian textbooks
find nothing to dwell on in their favoured mode of
reporting dramatic events centred on morally-inspired
defiance and the spirit of sacrifice. The fact is that the mid-
1920s present the textbook writers with a substance so
radically different from such favoured material that many
of them simply ignore this period altogether while others
mention it as briefly as possible. We are referring to the
148 Rival Histories
unprecedented scale and intensity of communal riots that

took place between 1923 and 1927. The most serious riots
in UP took place in Agra, Shahjahanpur, and Saharanpur
in 1923, in Allahabad and Lucknow in 1926, and in
Bareilly, Kanpur, and Dehradun in 1927. Communal
violence also occurred in Punjab, Bengal, and in certain
places in southern and western India in these years. The
most immediate causes which are said to have triggered
these riots were cow slaughter and music in front of
mosques. 1'
These riots are ignored in the maJority of Indian
textbooks; in the ones which mention them, the riots are
not discussed with any major significance attached to them.
For instance, the NCERT Class VIII text makes a passing
reference to the riots in the opening lines of the chapter
that covers the nationalist movement from 1923 to 1939:
'For some years after the withdrawal of the Non-cooperation
movement there was no nation-wide struggle. For sometime,
there was a widespread feeling of disappointment and
frustration in the country. There were communal riots and
the Hindu-Muslim unity-achieved before and during the
Non-cooperation struggle-seemed to be weakening.' Within
the next two statements, however, the narrative retrieves
its uplifting tone, 'The struggle for freedom had apparently
suffered a setback. These years, however, were also years of
preparation for a more powerful struggle.' 16 From here
onwards the text focuses on the activities of the Swaraj
party, which was formed in 1923, and the social
reconstruction programme of the Congress which included
the promotion of khadi and opposition to untouchability.
This choice of focus permits Dev and Dev, the writers of
this text, to ignore the divisive consequences that the
working of democracy, especially the provision for separate
electorates, had in the functioning of local-level institutions

of democracy. The focus also enables the narrative to
ignore the significant role that religious revivalism played
among both Hindus and Muslims in encouraging separatist
tendencies.
The senior-level NCERT textbook by Bipan Chandra
gets amazingly convoluted while interpreting the events
that followed the formal withdrawal of Non-cooperation
and the end of Khilafat on account of developments in
Turkey. First, on Khilafat, the textbook says that_ 'some ·
historians' who criticize the Congress involvement in
Khilafat are right 'to an extent', yet, 'there was, of course,
nothing wrong in the nationalist movement taking up a
demand that affected Muslims only'. It was expected, the
writer says, that 'different sections of society would come
to understand the need for freedom through their particular
demands'. Here it is obvious that religious identity is
acceptable to the writer as the marker of a 'section' of
society. In the main argument running through the book,
it is not. Indeed, the book spares no opportunity to explain
that religion is not as important as economic interests in
shaping the course of history.
In the context of Khilafat, the argument proceeds to
distinguish two levels. The nationalist leadership failed, the
student is told, 'to some extent in raising the religious
political consciousness of the Muslims to the higher plane
of secular political consciousness'. At the same time, the
student is reminded that the Khilafat demand was 'an
aspect of the general spread of the anti-imperialist feelings
among the Muslims'. As proof of this point, the book
offers the argument that 'after all there was no protest in
India when Kamal Pasha abolished the Caliphate in 1924'.
This argument seems to suggest that the Muslims of India
150 Rival Histories
appreciated the eventual abolition of the Caliphate because

it was brought about by Turkey's own leadership, not by
an imperialist agency. This attribution of recognition of
Turkey's modernist turn is contradicted by a statement
made on the same page a little earlier where the text says
that the modernist steps taken by Kamal Pasha 'broke the
back of the Khilafat agitation' . 17
The awkward movement of the narrative continues
when this text mentions the outbreak of communal riots
following the termination of Non-cooperation. People felt
frustrated, it says, and 'communalism raised its ugly head'.
Both the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha took
advantage of the situation and the feeling that 'all people
were Indians first received a setback'. A general political
apathy spread, and Gandhi took temporary retirement.
Despite the situation getting 'dark', the reader is reassured
that 'behind the scenes, forces of national upsurge had been
growing' as the response to the visit of Simon Commission
showed.
A new chapter began in the freedom movement, we
are told, and a new chapter begins in Chandra's textbook
too. In the new chapter, we notice that the record of
'nationalist' activities gets spatially separated from the
record of 'communalist' activities. The last point at which
the two figure together comes when the Nehru Report was
under preparation. Briefly explaining its failure to obtain
consensus, Chandra says: 'It should also be noted here that
there existed a basic difference between the politics of the
nationalists and the politics of the communalists.' The
difference was that the former fought with the government
on behalf of all Indians; the latter sought favours from the
government for their own communities. After this point,
this textbook makes no attempt to weave the discussion of
communal forces into the larger narrative of the freedom

struggle. Twelve pages later, 'the rise of communalism'
figures as a separate subsection, discussing it as the 'fifth
important development' of the late 1930s. Long before the
Partition of India occurs, a partition of the two narratives
occurs in the text. Far from preparing the student to make
sense of the speedy developments of the 1940s and the
eventual break-up of the subcontinent, this jettisoning of
the narrative of communalism from the main story of the
freedom struggle incapacitates the student from making
any sense of why things happened the way they did.
We can better appreciate the pedagogic problems this
text presents by recalling the issues raised in Chapter II
concerning children's intellectual development and their
comprehension of history. Young students of history, even
at the age of seventeen, may find it especially difficult to
understand an episode which features the intermingling of
events. Their ability to see a moment of the past from the
different perspectives of the actors involved in it is
constrained further if noteworthy events have occurred
simultaneously in different regions. The early 1920s are
one such moment in the history of the freedom struggle.
From Punjab to the Malabar coast and the plains of UP,
very different kinds of developments are noticed. As a
factor of analysis and understanding, geography can be of
great help here. Generally speaking, geography has the
potential to made the study of the past more interesting for
children. The least that textbook authors can do to take
advantage of geography as a resource for history teaching
is to provide a map, locating different areas where events
took place: This modest facility is overlooked in all Indian
textbooks of modern history.
The early 1920s appear as a mass of details, sometimes
152 Rival Histories
interlocked and at other times discordant, with no clues

that might help the student to sort them out. The dominant
personality of the newly arrived Gandhi does not help
much either, for he is presented with highly selective
strokes as we have seen earlier, restraining the student
from forming a holistic idea of the man. A handful of
biographical details about him can hardly be of much use
in this respect. One wonders why, not just geography, but
biography too is used so reluctantly by Indian text writers.
Is it a constraint of space that the Indian system of
education imposes on every text writer or is it a policy
decision to keep history focused on social forces rather
than personalities? Most likely, both reasons are applicable
in the case of the two NCERT textbooks we have just
discussed.
Let us now turn our attention to the portrayal of the
mid-1920s in Pakistani textbooks. It is interesting that they
too largely ignore the communal tension and the riots that
took place in this period. The only major exception is J.
Hussain's illustrated history which attempts to identify the
different approaches used by historians for explaining why
the 1920s witnessed an exacerbation of communal conflict
throughout the subcontinent. Most other Pakistani
textbooks find no room for discussing the steep decline of
communal harmony that followed the bonhomie witnessed
at the start of the decade. It is not difficult for us to
speculate on why Pakistani texts are so similar to their
Indian counterparts in this matter. As we shall see in
subsequent episodes too, and most glaringly in the context
of Partition, both Indian and Pakistani textbooks avoid
giving details of communal violence, including basic facts
like the places where violence erupted and the number of
people killed and injured.
On the face of it, one may say that the writers of

school textbooks do not consider communal violence an
appropriate topic for young students. An obvious
justification for such a policy is a generalized one, namely
that unpleasant truths like the killing of people belonging
to one religious community by members of another may
leave a harmful or wrong impression on young minds, i.e.
encourage them to condone such acts. The argument is so
simple and artless, and thereby so similar to the popular
stereotype of children's nature, that we do not question it,
just as we do not question the practice of banning any
discussion of contemporary violence at school, including
violence that children may have personally witnessed. 18
The psychological appeal of such an argument is, in fact,
based on the denial of children's psychological need to
make sense of, and come to terms with, mass frenzy when
they have witnessed it. The knowledge that mass violence
has erupted a number of times in the history of Hindu-
Muslim relations is available to children through the media,
including cinema and television, as well as in family lore in
both India and Pakistan. The reason why textbook writers
pretend that it may be best to protect children from such
knowledge at school perhaps lies in the nature of the
nation-building role which schools and history textbooks
are supposed to perform.
The role demands an assiduous filtering out of the
record of communal violence from the narrative of the
national movement to whatever extent possible. This
imperative applies to Pakistan as much as it does to India,
though in the Indian case a clear distinction is made
between nationalism and communalism, and the two are
portrayed as being contradictory forces, whereas in Pakistan
the two ideas are conflated. The consolidation of collective
154 Rival Histories
self-identity in commumtles was a common aspect of

nationalist consciousness and the struggle for freedom. 19
Even though communalism as a political force is rightly
portrayed as being hostile to nationalism, the narrative of
nationalism can hardly be disentangled from the record of
communal consciousness. Write rs of school textbooks
carefully guard the parameters within which communalism
acquired a negative image. Precise details of communal
violence or any substantial discussion of its causes would
necessarily transgress these parameters. Text writers find it
best to avoid the mention of communal conflict to the
extent possible; where it cannot be avoided, as in the case
of the violence associated with Partition, they acknowledge
it in the fewest possible words as we shall see later.
Moving beyond this similarity between the textbooks
of the two countries in their portrayal of the mid-1920s,
we can now approach a key feature of the Pakistani books.
They gloss over the differences within the Congress, and
insist on portraying it as a single cohesive body with well-
defined goals. Pakistani textbooks do not even mention the
Hindu Mahasabha as being an important player in the
politics of the 1920s, let alone being a major influence
within the Congress. That the Hindu Mahasabha exercised
a deep psychological influence on developments in the
Congress, especially in the context of the Nehru
Committee's Report, cannot be guessed by a lay reader of
Indian histories of the freedom struggle, but the Pakistani
accounts also make a definite attempt to ignore this
influence. The reason is not difficult to guess, given the
larger orbit of meaning they construct for their young
readers. They ignore the influence of the Hindu Mahasabha
on the Congress because it enables them to target the
Congress more purposefully by calling it an organization
of Hindus and by, alleging that it was committed to

establishing a Hindu Raj in India. Such an approach
permits Pakistani text writers to make leaders like Gandhi
and Nehru indistinct from Malaviya and Moonje.
Nehru Report
The report prepared by the committee set up by the All
Parties Confe!"ence in February 1928 and chaired by Motilal
Nehru stands erased from the record of the freedom
movement in most of the school textbooks used in India.
The few which mention it treat its preparation as a minor
event in history, deserving only a passing mention. There
is just one exception which I will discuss a little later. The
case of Pakistani textbooks is a complete contrast. The
Nehru Report has a key place in the record of the national
memory they present. That may be one reason why they
use a broad brush to paint the Congress at the time the
Nehru Report was written and discussed. Pakistani school
historians falsify known facts by suggesting that the Nehru
Report was an expression of the Hindu mind or that it was
'based on anti-Muslim and anti-Islam sentiments' (Rabbani
and Sayyid). This may be an extreme example, but it has
elements that are common to other textbooks.
A representative version of this important episode· of
Pakistan's national history can be found in the Class VIII
Punjab state textbook. The choice of details made for
inclusion in this thirteen-page story of freedom can be seen
as significant in that it indicates the ideological and pedagogic
mapping of Pakistan's national memory. This highly
compressed narrative states clearly what the occasion for
the Nehru Report was, then mentions the 'Muslim response'
to it, and moves on to list the fourteen points presented by
Jinnah.
156 Rival Histories
Before we look at this text's commentary on the

Nehru Report, let us recognize that we are examining an
episode on which the Indian and Pakistani school textbooks
exhibit total divergence. In the portrayal of earlier episodes
we noticed differences of approach and perspective; in this
case, we find total disagreement. What is significant for the
Pakistani school historian has little importance for his
Indian counterpart. Not a single middle-level Indian
textbook mentions the Nehru Report. After the visit of
the Simon Commission, the Civil Disobedience Movement
of 1930 forms the next stopover, as it were. Both events
resonate the generic character of the Indian freedom struggle
as an adventure tale. Indian text writers view the Nehru
Report as a political event lacking this character, and
therefore they erase it entirely from the junior-level texts.
For the older readers of Class X and XII, it is mentioned
briefly as a minor occurrence which did not influence the
main course of the Indian freedom struggle. And that is
precisely what it did if we see it from the Pakistani school
historian's perspective.
We may disagree with the representation of the Nehru
Report in Pakistani textbooks, but we can hardly disagree
with the point that the ideological differences it brought to
the fore made a fundamental difference to the Indian
freedom struggle and, in that sense, it constituted a
chronological watershed. In his study of Muslim
nationalism, Mushirul Hasan calls the Nehru Report 'the
last straw for the Congress-Muslim relationship'. He says:
'After 1928, many Muslims who had earlier joined Congress
became increasingly hostile to its activities. This was
particularly evident during the civil disobedience movement.
In marked contrast to the non-cooperation days, Muslims
participated in very small numbers in civil disobedience.' 20
This picture contrasts quite sharply with the one that

Indian school textbooks portray. Most Indian textbooks
claim that all sections of Indian society actively participated
in the Civil Disobedience Movement. It makes sense why
Indian texts uniformly stick to this dubious claim. The
narrative of the Indian freedom struggle structurally excludes
all but the pro-Congress Muslims from 1928 onwards. That
is why the meagre participation of Muslims in the Civil
Disobedience Movement is glossed over in the Indian
record of national memories. This tacit policy of attaching
no significance to organized Muslim response is what we
see in the discussions of the Nehru Report in all senior
secondary level textbooks.
Among Indian texts, the only one that gives a somewhat
detailed account of the Nehru Report is Perin Bagli's text
for Class X. It explains the occasion of the Report, mentions
the names of its members, and gives details of its
recommendations for the Indian Constitution and the
Parliament. However, concerning the Muslim leaders'
response to the Report, all that this book has to say is: 'Mr
Jinnah, on behalf of the Muslim League, moved a number
of amendments to those portions of the Report which
dealt with communal matters, but finally the Report was
approved.' Clearly, this text attaches no significance to the
amendments demanded by Jinnah. Moreover, from the
perspective of this text, it would seem as if all the issues
raised by him were 'communal matters', lacking national
significance.
The sharp bifurcation of the 'communal' and 'national'
is a structural feature of the Indian narrative of freedom. Its
conceptual validity apart, its role in enabling school
historians to project their own perspective into the study
of the past is quite remarkable. It is historically true that
several liberal Congressmen did not regard Jinnah's demands
158 Rival Histories
as being purely communal. Indeed, the need to take the

Muslim leadership along was a policy of the Congress, and
for this purpose the Congress was not institutionally against
the consideration and fulfilment of the demands which
pertained to the specific interests of Muslims. To regard
such demands as purely communal, and to hold such
'communal' demands in sharp opposition to national
demands is to think ahistorically. If textbook writers cared
to look back, they might recall that in che context of
Khilafat, which had occurred not so long ago, they had
readily treated a concern specific to the Muslims as national.
How did Muslim concerns become purely communal in
less than a decade? The use of context-specific interpretive
strategies arises out of an ideological anxiety to socialize
the young reader, and it necessarily discourages the
development of historical thinking.
The Indian text writer's practice of sharply dividing
the 'communal' and the 'national' in an anachronistic
manner has a corollary in the Pakistani text writer's
construction of monolithic 'Muslim' and 'Hindu'
perspectives. No Pakistani textbook lets the young reader
know that the Congress was a party with people from a
large range of social backgrounds and ideological positions.
Pakistani textbook writers talk about Hindu politicians as
if they all had the same viewpoint. These writers completely
forget that Jinnah had many sympathizers and admirers in
the Congress who tried hard to incorporate his main
demands in the Nehru Report. 21 Apparently, such an
acknowledgement would go against the grain of the master
narrative of Pakistan's freedom and birth. The ideological
character of this narrative demands the backdating of the
separatist urge in Muslim politics. It also impels the text
writers to exclude all those Muslim and Hindu leaders who
consistently rejected the pressure the Congress was under

all the time to use the nationalist movement as an
opportunity to fulfil specifically Muslim or Hindu
expectations. Moreover, no Pakistani textbook tells its
readers that there was a considerable regional variation in
the Muslim response to the Nehru Report. When a primary-
level Punjab state textbook says, 'Muslims were completely
disappointed with the Report', it is not using the language
of history. This kind of language is pedagogically
meaningless too, for there is nothing a child or a primary-
level teacher can do to ascertain the meaning of terms like
'Muslims' and their 'complete' disappointment. Yet, we
must concede that pedagogic barrenness has great potential
as a source of political and ideological indoctrination.
9
Contrary Imaginations
from 1930 onwards, for the remaining seventeen years

of the story of freedom, the divergence between the two
master narratives rapidly increases. Common points of
reference become increasingly scarce in the midst of
mutually exclusive bodies of detail. The established character
and structure of the two stories gain sharpness. More
remarkably, we come across an interchange, in terms of
the speed at which historical time is covered by words or
text space. Up to the period of the late 1920s, Indian
textbooks cover the time-span between two events relatively
more 'slowly' in the sense that they dwell on specific
events and fill the time-gap between events with some
explanation. Pakistani texts, on the contrary, appear to be
moving 'fast': they barely mention certain major events,
and at times cover several years of historical time in half a
sentence. In respect of this speed of coverage, the two sets
Contrary Imaginations 161
of textbooks interchange their character as they enter the

1930s, and especially when they get into the late 1930s.
From then onwards, Indian textbooks become unusually
'fast', and Pakistani textbooks become remarkably 'slow'.
Why the coverage of the last decade and a half of the
freedom struggle should heighten the difference between
the two sets of school texts is not difficult to explain; the
interchange of the pace of time-coverage is. Let us first
look at the sharpening of divergence between the Indian
and Pakistani textbooks, remembering though, that despite
the divergence, the two stories never become mirror images
of each other. The difference between the Indian and the
Pakistani master narratives of freedom from British rule is
essentially in the choice of events they merition. Certain
details are highlighted in one story; in the other, they are
mentioned without emphasis or they are ignored altogether;
and vice versa. This tendency increases in the coverage of
the events that took place in the last seventeen years of the
struggle. The tendency becomes so strong that at times we
wonder if we are reading about the same past in the two
historical accounts. In the context of nation-building, which
is relevant both to Indian and Pakistani textbooks, we can
say that the politics of mention becomes more compelling
as the stories come closer to the ending. As we discussed in
Chapter V, the ending is not identical if we see it from the
perspective of the nation-building agendas of the two
systems of education. Attainment of freedom is common
to both stories, but the Indian story must explain why
India was divided, while the Pakistani story must explain
how the division was made to happen. This crucial difference
between the orientations of the two narratives forces their
last sections to construct the relevant bodies of facts
increasingly differently.
162 Rival Histories
The two orientations symbolize the nationalist urge

that the two nation-states want to nurture with the help of
education. The memory of the nationalist struggle needs
firmer shaping in the last episodes compared to the earlier
ones. True, in certain Pakistani texts, the shadow of the
ending extends to earlier episodes too; indeed, as we have
seen, certain Pakistani authors do not mind going as far
back as the nineteenth century in their search for the seeds
of the idea of Pakistan. Still others detect the birth of
Pakistan in the birth of Islam. Ayesha J alal traces these
'priceless ·examples' of the official discourse to 'tensions
between the ideology of Muslim nationalism and the
geographic limitations of the Pakistani nation-state' .1
Ignoring the boldly imaginative authors Jalal is
concerned with, we can fruitfully focus on the relatively
sober Pakistani writers who establish a certain irreversibility
in historical developments at a time when Jinnah failed to
win sufficient support for his demand for modifications in
the Nehru Report. Inasmuch as the master narrative of the
Pakistan Movement identifies with Jinnah, it treats 1928 as
the year when a 'parting of ways' occurred. Beyond this
point, the Pakistani school historian sees no need to report
on developments which did not directly strengthen the
separatist nationalism of Jinnah. A general idea and the
premonitional naming of Pakistan occurred soon after this
point, so the Pakistani account ·finds adequate reasons to
underemphasize or altogether ignore even major events
that took place from here onwards. The fact that these
incidents had a crucial role to play in the pursuit of India's
claim to freedom does not seem to matter. To use
Anderson's phrase, once the 'imagined community' has
been imagined and named, all that matters for its chronicler
is to tell how that dream was realized. 2
The Indian nationalist memory has quite a different

task at hand while dealing with the 1930s and beyond. The
gist of that task is to celebrate the struggle and the eventual
triumph of secular inspiration, despite the gnawing
awareness that its triumph was marred and vitiated by
religious separatism and Partition. A close identification
with secular nationalism compels the school historian to
marginalize the story of the political struggle of religious
separatists from the early 1930s onwards. The master
narrative of the Indian freedom movement projects the
bitter awareness of Partition onto the political happenings
of the late 1930s, and lets that awareness of the eventual
outcome influence the selection of facts to be used in
recording the last ten years of the nationalist movement.
The Indian school historian, thus, constructs a past in
which religious separatism was not in a position to shape
the course of history, when, in fact, the historian is aware
that separatism was rapidly gaining ground. Celebrating
India's birth as a pluralist, modern nation perhaps demands
such a construction. As a national narrator, it is the school
historian's responsibility to train the young to treat
'nationalism' and 'communalism' as antonyms.
Fulfilment of this responsibility requires that the
narrative of freedom should exclude the detailed record of
'communal' gains. Unfortunately, the imperative to exclude
this record implies an increasingly stringent selection of
events from the late 1930s and thereon. Not only does
'communal' politics, fuelled by the demand for Pakistan,
advance and expand rapidly in the 1940s, its status as an
adversary to secular nationalism also grows during the
World War II years. As it happened, the structure of the
colonial reality imposed an annoying pressure on the
'nationalist' to negotiate with the 'communal' adversary.
164 Rival Histories
Indian school historians find this triangular destiny of the

final phase of the freedom struggle somewhat incompatible
with their decision to focus squarely on the 'nationalist'
struggle, come what may. No wonder they find it necessary
to hurry through the maze of events that occurred in the
final years and months. Nearly all Indian textbooks get
noticeably more compressed in style and more selective in
detail when they deal with the last decade of the freedom
movement. In several textbooks, this decade takes barely
three or four pages to cover.
The opposite happens in Pakistani texts. Having raced
through the earlier decades of 'hopes and disillusionment',
'more hopes and more disillusionment', as J. Hussain
characterizes them, school historians finally find a decade
in which details become worth discussing. The late 1930s
figure in every Pakistani textbook as a time to sit down
and look around, taking note of happenings as well as
tendencies. And then, once the 1940s start, every date
worth mentioning attracts interpretation, not just recording.
What gets a line in an Indian text gets a page or more in
Pakistani texts at this point, before the two regain a
similarity in delineating the final moment of mid-August
1947, as we shall see in the next chapter. The late 1930s and
the 1940s give the Pakistani school historian the opportunity
to slow down and splurge, not merely in terms of giving
detail, but also in terms of explaining.
The Early 1930s
In Indian textbooks, the decade opens with an elaborate

account of the Civil Disobedience Movement. The NCERT
text by Bipan Chandra presents the launching of Civil
Disobedience as a response to the new 'mood' reflected in
the boycott of the Simon Commission and the rise of

radical forces. Other textbooks construct no such scenario,
and present Civil Disobedience as a decision. However, the
mode of its start is represented in just about every text by
referring to Gandhi's Dandi March. The young reader is
given little chance to appreciate why or how Gandhi might
have hit upon the idea of choosing common salt as a means
to express wilful disobedience to an alien, unjust rule. The
elapse of two months between the Lahore session of the
Congress and Gandhi's disclosure of a programme for a
struggle based on Civil Disobedience goes unreported.
Once again, we see Gandhi as a man who could conjure up
miracles instantaneously. His choice of salt as a symbol
appears as a matter of consensus among his colleagues,
which it was not. And then, precisely what he did to make
salt remains vague. The closest any text comes to describing
what he might have done is Bipan Chandra's book which
says that Gandhi 'picked up a handful of salt and broke the
salt law'. The Gujarat text for Class VIII says Gandhi
broke the salt law by 'taking a pinch of salt'. The NCERT
textbook for the same level explains that the salt Gandhi
picked up had been 'formed by the evaporation of sea
water'. Other texts remain oblivious to the need to explicate
or visualize the act, and some, like the Tamil Nadu
textbook for Class VIII, ignore it altogether.
Precisely what did Gandhi do? To appreciate how little
the writers of school texts care for their young readers'
curiosity and sensibility, we can go to Louis Fischer's
description of the event. It shows how major an opportunity
this episode provides for history being brought to life if
only the chronicler would care to do so. Fischer's portrayal
of the Dandi March brings out the ethos of Gandhi's
leadership as we can see from the following excerpt:
166 Rival Histories
On 12 March, prayers having been sung, Gandhi

and seventy-eight male and female members of the
ashram, whose identities were published in Young
India for the benefit of the police, left Sabarmati
for Dandi, due south of Ahmedabad. Gandhi leaned
on a lacquered bamboo staff one inch thick and
fifty-four inches long with an iron tip. Following
winding dirt roads from village to village, he and
his seventy-eight disciples walked two hundred
miles in twenty-four days. 'We are marching in the
name of God,' G·andhi said ...
He had no trouble in walking. 'Less than twelve
miles a day in two stages with not much luggage,'
he said. 'Child's play!' Several became fatigued and
footsore, and had to ride in a bullock cart. A horse
was available for Gandhi throughout the march
but he never used it. 'The modern generation is
delicate, weak, and much pampered,' Gandhi
commented. He was sixty-one. He spun every day
for an hour and kept a diary and required each
ashramite to do likewise.
In the area traversed, over three hundred village
headmen gave up their government posts. The
inhabitants of a village would accompany Gandhi
to the next village. Young men and women attached
themselves to the marching column; when Gandhi
reached the sea at Dandi on 5 April, his small
ashram band had grown into a non-violent army
several thousand strong.
The entire night of 5 April, the ashramites prayed,
and early in the morning they accompanied Gandhi
to the sea. He dipped into the water, returned to
the beach, and there picked up some salt left by the

waves. Mrs Sarojini Naidu, standing by his side,
cried, 'Hail, Deliverer.' Gandhi had broken the
British law which made it a punishable crime to
possess salt not obtained from the British
government salt monopoly. Gandhi, who had not
used salt for six years, called it a 'nefarious
monopoly'. 3
Textbooks not only fail to convey th~s kind of vivid

impression of Gandhi's innovative campaign and the ethos
of Civil Disobedience, they also gloss over the political
challenge he had hoped to meet by launching this campaign.
Why the Irwin offer to progress towards Dominion Status
was bypassed, and why Gandhi preferredJawaharlal Nehru
as Congress president despite opposition are among the
many questions that make the turn of the decade a politically
interesting point in history. If Percival Spear4 is right in
guessing that Gandhi was anxious to avoid a left-right split
in the Congress, his manoeuvring capacity deserves to be
brought to the notice of school-children-if only because it
makes Gandhi more appreciable as a political leader. As on
the previous occasion of Non-cooperation, this time too,
the bulk of Indian textbooks prefer to portray Gandhi as
a superhuman arbiter of India's destiny. Many text writers
describe the launch of the Civil Disobedience bluntly as
Gandhi's 'order'. The passage of time since the early 1920s
seems to make little difference to anything. Gandhi remains
a frozen figure of greatness, and so does his favourite
strategy. With the exception of Bipan Chandra's textbook,
no other book explains how Civil Disobedience was an
advance on Non-cooperation. More significantly, without
exception, Indian textbooks suppress the historical fact
168 Rival Histories
that unlike Non-cooperation and Khilafat, Civil

Disobedience did not attract much Muslim participation.
The breakdown that occurred over the Nehru Report
apparently loses all significance for Indian school historians
when they talk about the rise of radical movements and
the starting of Civil Disobedience. More ominously, they
turn a blind eye to the sharpening of the Hindu-Muslim
division in both political and cultural spheres. It was in
1932 that the children of United Provinces stopped reading
a shared primer. For the first time, separate primers were
demanded and introduced for Hindi and Urdu in vernacular
primary schools. 5 Of course, one does not expect such
details to find a place in history textbooks, but the
acknowledgement of a growing communal divide
exemplified by episodes like this, would certainly protect
students from the epistemic shock they get on hearing
about the vehement demand for Partition made in the
1940s. They would be better equipped to understand later
events if they knew about the Muslim League's refusal to
take part in Civil Disobedience and Iqbal's suggestion in
1930 for a Muslim state within the Indian federation.
Before we move over to see how Pakistani textbooks
portray the early 1930s, let us also look at the coverage
given in Indian textbooks to the Round Table Conferences.
The Class XII NCERT textbook by Bipan Chandra
maintains a silence on who attended the First and the
Third Round Table Conferences. About the absence of the
Congress at the First Round Table Conference, this text
says that it was like 'staging Ramlila without Rama'. The
Third Conference finds no mention at all; nor do the
Communal Award and the Poona Pact between Gandhi
and Ambedkar. Already, we can see this otherwise slow-
moving, densely written text gaining speed, bypassing
major events. True, every historian selects the facts he

considers worthy of mention; what we notice at this point
in this textbook is a definite increase in the rate of
selection. Most other textbooks display the same change,
focusing on the Second Round Table Conference because
Gandhi attended it, then moving on to the Government of
India Act of 1935. Quite a few texts move straight to the
Quit India Movement, leaping over a decade of
developments. Perin Bagli's book for ICSE schools is
perhaps the only text that gives students some idea regarding
the participants of the First Round Table Conference and
the proceedings of the Third. It also provides a box on
Ambedkar's life and mentions that the Poona Pact 'nearly
doubled the number of seats reserved for the Depressed
Classes, to be filled by them alone'. The NCERT Class
VIII text has a special section on movements of the
Depressed Classes, but even here we find no mention of
the Poona Pact. Looking at this general tendency, one
wonders why the Poona Pact fails to qualify for an
honourable place in the saga of India's freedom.
In Pakistani textbooks the early 1930s acquire a
landscape strikingly different from the one we see in Indian
texts. The contrast arises out of three factors: focus on
Iqbal's Allahabad speech, lack of emphasis on Civil
Disobedience, and the importance given to all three Round
Table Conferences. The key issue, according to every text,
is the Congress's refusal to acknowledge the minority
problem. We see it in certain texts in highly personalized
terms as a struggle between Gandhi and Jinnah. - S.F.
Mahmud's text is somewhat exceptional in that it attempts
to indicate the ethos of the early 1930s, though it does so
extremely briefly. The text says that as a result of the Civil
Disobedience Movement,
170 Rival Histories
Hindus became very confident and the words as

well as the attitude of their leaders began to show
that the Purna Swaraj which they now began to
demand, meant the rule of the majority in India,
that is the Hindus. The Muslims became alarmed
and the differences between the two groups became
more marked. Political awakening among the masses
of both the communities widened this gulf and
there were clashes in many places which developed
into Hindu-Muslim riots. 6
Although it is somewhat simplistic to attribute the widening

of the communal divide directly to 'political awakening',
this statement is perhaps the only one we find in the
school literature of the subcontinent which permits the
reader to wonder about a relationship between democracy
and the consolidation of collective self-identity in an early
stage of modernization. The sociology of incipient
modernity and nationalism has been a subject of considerable
research which points to the expression of religious and
other ethnic identities as a common outcome. 7 Mahmud's
book does not elaborate on this, but we must give it credit
for giving a hint, although it is true that the hint can be
easily misconstrued as a criticism of democracy.
Mahmud's point that the Civil Disobedience Movement
brought about self-confidence, if only among the Hindus-
an exaggeration, though it is true that Muslim participation
was low-is contradicted by several Pakistani texts. They
either criticize Civil Disobedience or ignore it. Rabbani
and Sayyid's textbook says that the Civil Disobedience
Movement failed and exposed the Congress position
regarding the boycott of the First Round Table Conference.
'The Congress wanted to wriggle out of this situation in a
dignified manner,' this textbook says, while the government

was keen to ensure the Congress participation at the
Second Round Table Conference and that is why the
Gandhi-Irwin pact took place. Release of Civil Disobedience
detenus under this pact provides this text the only reason
to let its readers know that arrests had been made. Gandhi's
Dandi March and the repression that followed it are
ignored. Gandhi's attitude at the Second Round Table
Conference is described as 'resolute and stubborn'. The
text constructs a dialogue between Gandhi and Jinnah in
these words: 'Gandhi insisted that there was only one
nation in India which were Hindus. But the Quaid-e-Azam
replied that Indian Muslims were also a separate nation of
India which had its own interests.' 8
The only two textbooks that attempt to provide a
plausible explanation of the Congress stand and strategies
are those by Bajwa and Hussain. The interpretation given
by these authors deserves careful reading, especially with a
view to comparing their interpretations with the ones we
noted in our reading of the Indian texts. At the start of his
section on the Round Table Conferences, Bajwa recalls
that the Congress and the League had both boycotted the
Simon Commission. The Congress responded to the
announcement of a Round Table Conference in London
by insisting on two commitments: one, that the conference
was aimed specifically at drafting a scheme to give India a
Dominion Status; and two, that the terms agreed upon in
London would be implemented. When the government
expressed its inability to give any such undertaking, the
Congress decided not to participate in the Round Table
Conference and, moreover, declared complete independence
as the only goal. Bajwa mentions the boycott of assemblies
and a general campaign of Civil Disobedience, but reminds
172 Rival Histories
his readers that the Muslim League stayed away from this
call, and that the Khilafat leader, Mohammad Ali, called on
Muslims to ignore the Congress call. The text offers no
guesses why the Muslim response to Civil Disobedience
was so negative. A little later, while discussing the Second
Round Table Conference, Bajwa indicates how a three-way
impasse developed. He says:
Gandhi refused to recognise the problem of
minorities within the subcontinent and dubbed
them 'communalists' and 'hangers-on'. The Muslim
League had a strong delegation again with both
Allama Iqbal and M.A. Jinnah attending. There
was obviously little chance of an agreement with
Congress taking such a hard line and the situation
became more complicated with non-caste Hindu
leaders demanding separate electorates for
themselves. 9
The gist of Bajwa's approach is to put the onus of
intransigence on the Congress, especially on Gandhi,
focusing mainly on the politics of the early 1930s. Ignoring
Gandhi's activism and mass mobilization, Bajwa's text
retains a studious identification with Jinnah and closes the
discussion of the early 1930s by citing Jinnah's
disillusionment with everybody-the Congress, the British,
as well as the leaders of the Muslim community who were
'constantly fighting with each other'.
The text by J. Hussain takes a wider look at this
period; it reports on the Congress, and looks inside it as
well. Although this text calls the chapter covering the
period from 1927 to 1940 'The Idea of Pakistan', it offers
a wide-ranging fare to the young reader, including a separate
section on Jawaharlal Nehru and one on the Poona Pact.
No Indian textbook accords this status to the young Nehru

or to the Gandhi-Ambedkar agreement. Another special
feature of this text is that it reminds the young reader that
the Congress platform was used by radicals of both the
secular and the communal variety. Hussain's write-up on
Nehru traces a number of similarities between him and
Jinnah, e.g. their command of English and their faith in
progress and equality. 'But while Jinnah believed in the
necessity of legal guarantees of equality, Jawaharlal Nehru
placed his faith in economic progress. Jawaharlal Nehru
saw the British Empire as the single greatest cause of
poverty and economic stagnation in the subcontinent.' 10
The text suggests that Nehru's demand for a joint electorate
for building a strong, secular state was deceivingly supported
by Hindu extremists who believed that 'they could establish
a Hindu state because the Hindus were in majority'.
Hussain also devotes a section to the Communists and
provides a brief life sketch of Dada Mir Haider, one of the
accused in the Meerut Conspiracy Case, who was described
by British intelligence as the most dangerous among Indian
leftists, 'not because of any fondness of violence, but
because of his working class identity and ceaseless efforts'.
This text discusses the Civil Disobedience Movement
without mentioning the Muslim League's negative response
to it. Gandhi's Salt March, it says, 'caught the world's
imagination, and its participants had the world's sympathy
when 80,000 to 90,000 people were arrested'. These figures,
indicating the scale of British repression, are not mentioned
in any other Pakistani or any Indian textbook. Hussain
moves on to give an elaborate account of the repression of
Civil Disobedience in the Frontier where Abdul Ghaffar
Khan led the Khudai Khidmatgars or 'Servants of God'.
Iqbal's Allahabad address figures without any discussion,
174 Rival Histories
but the text indicates the worsening state of communal

relations by citing that Civil Disobedience ended with
communal rioting as Non-cooperation had done in the
previous decade. The report on the Second Round Table
Conference focuses on the personalities of Jinnah, Iqbal,
Gandhi and Nehru, but desists from mentioning the stands
taken by them. Hussain attributes the impasse with which
this Conference ended to Gandhi's opposition to recognizing
that the Scheduled Castes were a community distinct from
the Hindus. Finally, the failure of the Third Conference to
reach an agreement gives Hussain the opportunity to
interpret Jinnah's mood:
At one extreme, some of the Muslim political
bosses were solely concerned with their local
interests. Relying upon the British to protect them
indefinitely from the Hindu majority, they pulled
the Muslim League away from compromise. At the
other extreme, pulling the Congress away from
compromise were the orthodox Hindus, who made
no secret of their determination to dominate the
Muslims, or of their willingness to indulge in
communal rioting. 11
If this textbook were not written for children studying in
Pakistan, we could well have expected from it a similar
explanation of Gandhi's mood at this time. Wasn't he also
pulled in different directions, and feeling rather lost? In
Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope, Judith Brown writes: 'Personally
he would have liked to concede all the Muslim demands,
but his hands were tied by the views of Congress's own
small group of Muslim supporters'.12 Concerning Gandhi's
performance at the Second Round Table Conference, Brown
says that on the one hand he offended the leaders of
religious minorities present there by claiming that he alone

was India's true representative, and on the other, he alienated
the Hindus present by saying that they should give a
'blank cheque' to Muslims.
Gandhi was greatly dispirited by the communal
deadlock. His awareness of the impasse and his deep
disappointment over it are facts that school histories in
both countries have erased. Pakistani school textbooks are
not bothered enough about him to record how he felt; for
Indian textbooks, acknowledging that Gandhi was not able
to handle a situation is taboo.
Late 1930s
All Indian and Pakistani textbooks report the main
provisions of the Government of India Act passed in 1935.
If the page covering these provisions in an Indian textbook
were given to a Pakistani student, and vice versa, neither
would notice the mischief. But then, we would have to be
careful not to let a single paragraph of the subsequent
sections exchange hands this way.
No portion conveys as sharp a contrast between Indian
and Pakistani textbooks as the one following the virtually
identical coverage of the Government of India Act.
Apparently, the two national narratives come together
only over the memory of what their colonial masters did,
not while recalling what the nationalist leaders did. The
two years during which the Congress was in power in
seven provinces on its own, and in two others as part of a
coalition, receives a startlingly divergent coverage in the
textbooks of the two countries. If the organization of
national memories for the young were to be regarded as a
special compass for divining the past, one could venture to
say with some confidence that history had taken a decisive
turn towards Partition in the late. 1930s.
176 Rival Histories
In Indian textbooks, the late 1930s come across as a gap

in the march of events. The gap is partly filled by a brief
reference to the work done by the Congress ministries.
This reference is so brief-mostly a paragraph-that it does
not alter the main impression the young reader might get
of this period as a time when nothing important happened
in the nationalist movement. Indeed, the discussion of
Congress ministries is so sketchy that the period between
the announcement of the Government of India Act in 1935
and the outbreak of World War II in 1939 does not qualify
even as a minor stopover in the adventurous journey that
the narrative of the freedom struggle attempts to provide.
That kind of journey-like image, in which major stopovers
mean powerful episodes of protest, sacrifice and repression,
is best borne out by the capsule-story of freedom which we
find in Indian textbooks for eleven-year-olds studying in
Class V. These accounts move from Civil Disobedience of
the early 1930s directly to the Quit India Movement of
1942. The decade in between is swallowed by a time warp
which has supposedly little to offer by way of inspiring
material to the pre-adolescent reader.
The few lines that Indian textbooks spend on the main
achievements of Congress ministries mostly list anti-usury
and tenancy legislations to improve the state of peasants,
release of political prisoners, and reforms in health services
and education. Barring one or two exceptions, Indian
textbooks do not specify the nature of educational reform.
For the precise name of Gandhi's scheme of innovative
education which the Congress governments adopted as a
policy, we must turn to the pages of Pakistani textbooks.
But there, the scheme is roundly condemned, as we shall
presently see. It is quite puzzling why Indian school
historians choose not to name and elaborate on the Wardha
Scheme. Surely, such a discussion would arouse children's

curiosity because the problems that Gandhi had noted at
the Wardha conference can still be seen in any school.
Also, it would provide a break from the relentless discussion
of politics that constitutes the bulk of any account of this
stage of the freedom struggle.
Most Indian textbooks maintain a complete silence on
the fact that the formation of the Congress ministry in the
United Provinces was not a smooth affair. There was
considerable tension within the Congress on the question
of the League's participation. The functioning of the
Congress government, particularly its programme of
educational reform, which was based on Gandhi's Wardha
Scheme, aroused a controversy and caused a rift between
Hindu and Muslim politicians. The controversy over
Gandhian Basic Education figured in other provinces too,
but the United Provinces witnessed a wider cultural turmoil
on account of the sensitive linguistic situation.
Gandhi's proposal for educational reform was insistent
on the use of the child's mother tongue. In the United
Provinces, where a serious rift had been developing for a
long time between Hindi and Urdu, the policy to promote
the mother tongue fell victim to the Hindu-Urdu
controversy. 13 There is a considerable body of historical
writing on these topics which would suggest that the
Congress ministries did not function in the kind of social
climate that Bipan Chandra describes in· his Class XII
textbook by saying: 'People felt as if they were breathing
the air of victory and self-government.' Perhaps some
people were breathing freedom, but Gandhi's own
assessment seems closer to the unpleasant fact that the
atmosphere was filled with communal disharmony. 14
Eminent educationist M. Mujeeb reminds us in a memoir
that in 1937 V.D. Savarkar declared India to consist of two
178 Rival Histories
nations-three years before the Muslim League did so. In

the same memoir, Mujeeb probes the conflict between the
Congress and the League and says that 'it was very poor
statesmanship that transformed a difference of opinion
over a ministerial post or two into a national struggle in
which a class felt that it was fighting for its life' . 15
One wonders what the Indian school historians gain
by presenting the 1937-39 period in so sketchy and
inaccurate a manner. The only answer is that by eliminating
the record of controversy, the textbooks sustain the young
reader's impression that the Congress was a moral force,
not merely a political party. Even this impression, however,
would have gained strength from the awareness that there
was tension within the Congress on the communal issue,
that despite this tension, the Congress continued to fight
for secularism and social justice. It is more plausible to
argue that Indian school historians want to keep the
political picture of the last decade of the freedom struggle
as sketchy as possible, for they do not expect school-level
students to appreciate the intricacies of the political
negotiations which shaped the course of events. Whether
or not this hypothesis is correct, the text writers' decision
to keep the record one-sided and superficial implies the
erasing of the names and contribution of men like K.M.
Ashraf, who led the Muslim mass-contact programme, and
Zakir Husain, who wotked hard· to dispel the malicious
propaganda of Muslim communalists against Gandhi's Basic
Education proposal. 16 If history teaching at school is mainly
pantheon building, as indeed it is for most Indian textbook
writers, the absence of such names makes the pantheon
considerably poorer.
There is just one Indian textbook which attempts to
make a wider coverage of the late 1930s. This is the !CSE

Class X text by Perin Bagli. It not only attempts to record
the criticisms made of Congress governments by the Muslim
League, it also attempts to give the young readers an idea
of regional variations in Muslim politics. Unfortunately,
this . remarkably well-produced textbook is written in a
rather uninterpretive style. Its recording of events is usually
more balanced, but why or how they occurred is often left
untouched. After giving a fairly detailed view of politics in
the late 1930s, Bagli says: 'the Muslims of India were
slowly converted to the proposal of a separate state for
themselves. The ideology of Iqbal, the visions of Rahmat
Ali and the fears of the Muslims, were united by the
practical genius of Jinnah'. 17 This dramatic and somewhat
mechanical summary may serve as a quotable quote for the
examinee interested in scoring well, but it explains little
and offers no clue for further inquiry. Was the idea of a
Muslim state a part of Iqbal's 'ideology'? Children can
hardly examine such a question without access to more
knowledge about Iqbal which the text does not provide.
What were the fears of the Muslims? The text is silent on
this question as well.
Questions of this level are especially important for the
present study, for they furnish the space where the
perspectives of the Indian and the Pakistani textbook
writers on the last decade of the freedom movement can be
compared. Before we move on to look at the version of the
Pakistani textbooks, it is worth considering one final point
in the Indian master narrative-its silence on Iqbal. The
poet-philosopher who gave India one of its most popular
and evocative nationalist songs is altogether ignored in
most Indian school textbooks. The reason is obvious.
Iqbal's despair and distance from the Congress during the
180 Rival Histories
last phase of his life pushed him towards the 'communal'

end of the 'national-communal' binary which I have
discussed earlier. A frequent user of this binary division,
Bipan Chandra devotes a substantial paragraph in his Class
XII NCERT text to talk admiringly of Iqbal's philosophy
and poetry. The paragraph ends abruptly by stating: 'In his
earlier poetry, he extolled patriotism, though later he
encouraged Muslim separatism.' How and why Iqbal might
have encouraged Muslim separatism becomes so
inconsequential in this statement that it might as well have
said Iqbal caught a virus in his later life. On the question
of Muslim fears, Chandra describes them as 'unreasonable'
though he acknowledges that the nationalist leaders failed
to understand the psychology of minorities.
The late 1930s occupy a significant place in all Pakistani
textbooks. Most of them record the fact that the election
results were shocking for the Muslim League. Sarwar gives
a table showing the comparative performance of the
Congress and the League. Most textbook writers quote
from the League's manifesto, and Bajwa mentions that it
was not very different from that of the Congress. 'J awaharlal
Nehru did not help matters', Bajwa says, 'by declaring that
there were only two parties in India, the British and the
Congress.' Iqbal's call to Jinnah is noted emotively: 'Iqbal
was furious with Nehru's statement and wrote to Jinnah to
urge him to prove Nehru wrong and to encourage the
Muslim League to throw off its image as a party of rich
Muslims and to promise greater help to all Muslims
according to Islamic principles'. The election results, this
textbook says, 'were not so good' for the League, but
Jinnah was 'not too disappointed or discouraged' as it was
the first time the League was contesting an election as a
mass party. This reading is quite different from what other
Pakistani textbooks provide. Hussain's textbook, for

example, offers the explanation that Jinnah had had only
six months to prepare for the elections, 'and his fellow
Muslims were not yet convinced of the overriding need for
unity'.
The new, interpretive style we notice in Pakistani
textbooks as they start the history of the final decade of .
the freedom movement incorporates a wide set of details as
the discussion moves towards the formation and functioning
of the Congress ministries. The writers of these textbooks
emphatically state that a change occurred in the Congress
attitude after its good performance in the 1937 elections.
Students are told that the Congress became proud and
unaccommodating. Hussain's text says that 'Jinnah expected
Congress to include distinguished Muslims in its provincial
governments for the sake of cooperation and goodwill, just
as it was customary in Muslim-majority areas to include
Muslims and Sikhs in the ministries'. This and other
textbooks elaborate on the conditions placed by the
Congress for the inclusion of the League's representatives
in the ministries. One of these conditions was the dissolution
of the League's identity as a political party. This episode
does not figure in every Pakistani textbook; yet, where it
does, it reinforces the impression that the Congress leaders
saw in 1937 an opportunity to give a lethal blow to
Jinnah's political fortunes. Many Pakistani .historians have
seen this episode as a turning point in Jinnah's life-one
which transformed him from an idealist into a political
realist.
We have nothing in Indian textbooks on this episode
to compare with the Pakistani textbooks' rendering. The
Indian silence can be interpreted either as a considered
decision on the ground that it adds nothing valuable to the
182 Rival Histories
. young student's understanding of the freedom struggle or,

alternatively, as a consequence of shortage of space. Though
the second possibility cannot be ruled out, given the
hurried nature of the coverage that Indian textbooks provide
in all subjects, the first interpretation seems more valid.
As the next chapter will show, Indian school
historiography treats the Partition as a minor story or a
sub-plot in the epic of freedom. The occurrences that
contributed to the fulfilment of this sub-plot are treated as
being structurally outside the saga of freedom, though they
are intertwined with events forming the saga. Thus, even
if the Indian school historians accepted the view that the
formation of ministries, particularly in the United Provinces,
became the context of a further widening of the Congress-
League rift, this episode proves dispensable because the text
is not expected to explain how the League's separatist
tendency acquired strength and momentum. That the League
had this tendency, or rather this kind of character, is
assumed in an earlier stage of the story in certain textbooks-
as early as 1906. In this sense, the Indian school texts
corroborate the Pakistani textbooks' claim that Pakistan
has a history longer than the specific demand to create it.
Together, Indian and Pakistani textbooks can be seen as
voices in a joint discourse which paints Pakistan as an
attitude or as an innate tendency, rather than a politically
conceived and accomplished project.
Returning to the Pakistani account of the late 1930s, it
is instructive to notice that very few among them specify
that the political differences between the League and the
Congress over the formation of ministries acquired an
operative significance mainly in the United Provinces. The
tendency to generalize that we have noted earlier in different
contexts, is powerful in this episode too. We see it getting
stronger m the section that follows the formation of

ministries, and focuses on their functioning. This section
has nothing to say about the land reforms and other
ameliorative measures which the Congress initiated, and
which the Indian textbooks list, though in a sketchy
manner. The thrust in Pakistani textbooks is on three
developments, which are all connected with Gandhi's
Wardha Scheme. It is an unusual focus. For an Indian
researcher, this attention comes as a surprise, partly because
it concerns an educational programme that we have been
accustomed to seeing as an innovative and socially
reconstructive one. In Pakistani textbooks we find it
discussed as a politically motivated programme of cultural
destruction.
Basic Education
Not a single Pakistani textbook mentions thac Gandhi's
main intention was to find an alternative to the bookish,
examination-oriented system of colonial education. More
interestingly, we find no mention whatsoever that the
focus of the Wardha Scheme was to integrate children's
learning of different subjects with training in a manual
craft. Of course, it is true that Indian textbooks also do not
mention this feature of Gandhi's scheme, suggesting thereby
that it is of no historical importance.
Pakistani school historians present the Wardha Scheme
purely in terms of the ethos of schools, reconstructed with
the help of practices like the singing of Vande Mataram,
hanging of pictures of Gandhi and of the goddess Saraswati,
and the emphasis on Hindi. Though these practices were
not directly a part of Gandhi's proposal for Basic Education
which the Congress governments adopted, they perhaps
acquired greater visibility in the context of the school's
184 Rival Histories
daily routine. The view of Vande Mataram as an anti-

Muslim song, and the conflict between Hindi and Urdu-
both had a longer history; what brought them to the
surface of public life and attention was in the context of an
educational change triggered off by Gandhi's proposal.
Gandhi's own personality and reputation as a Mahatma
cannot be dissociated from the perceptual frame that
Pakistani textbooks construct for discussing the Wardha
Scheme. Nor can we discount the impact of other
contemporary circumstances, particularly the growing
influence of Hindu revivalist movements like Shuddhi, on
the perception of Basic Education as a 'Hindu' conspiracy.
Also, the Hindi-Urdu controversy had already matured to
the point that in 1937 it was ripe for political use in the
context of an educational reform which made the use of
mother tongue mandatory in children's education. 18
The vehemence with which Basic Education is
condemned in Pakistani textbooks is bewildering.
Considering how little education figures in histories of
nation-states-even scholarly histories rarely discuss the
impact or the role of education-it comes as a surprise to
find a proposal for educational change being given so much
credit, even though negative, for influencing the course of
events. The strongly negative portrayal of Gandhi's scheme
that we find in Pakistani textbooks does not even mention
the title of Gandhi's proposal, let alone give any details
about its reception in society. To make sense of the
treatment it receives at the hands of Pakistani school
historians, let us first look at the words some of them use:
The Wardha Scheme of education which was a
creation of Gandhi's mind was implemented by the
Congress Government in the provinces. This was
an essentially communal scheme shot through and

through with Hindu ideals. The teaching of religion
was completely ignored, and this amounted to an
attempt to disengage the Muslim child from his
faith. Muslim children were obliged to honour the
Congress flag, to sing Bande Mataram, to wear
home-spun cloth (khadi) and to worship (the words
Puja ki jawe were used) Gandhi's portrait. (Sarwar)19
The Wardha Scheme was an outcome of Gandhi's
philosophy. It inculcated the Hindu nationalism
and principles of non-violence. It aimed at creating
a high respect among the young minds for the
Hindu heroes and religious leaders. The Wardha
and Widdia Mander schemes sought to isolate the
young generation of the Muslims from their religion,
culture and civilisation ... It aimed at injecting the
political ideas of one political party, the Congress,
into the minds of Muslim children. (Rabbani and
Sayyid) 20
In schools Hindi was introduced instead of Urdu.
Before the commencement of classes the students
saluted the portrait of Mahatma Gandhi and Muslim
students were also forced to do so. The Hindus
introduced the anthem entitled 'Bande Matram'
which contained feelings of hatred for the Muslims.
(Punjab Textbook Board) 21
'A Basic Education' scheme was launched by Gandhi
at Wardha, later known as the Wardha Scheme,
and was introduced in all Congress education
ministries. Spinning by hand was made a part of
the school curriculum and teaching was to be in
ljindi with no religious education which meant
186 Rival Histories
that Muslim students were at a disadvantage. School

children were also required to show reverence for
Gandhi's portrait which was hung up in their
schools. (Bajwa) 22
The last quotation is from Bajwa's textbook which belongs-
along with J. Hussain\: Illustrated History-to a pedagogically
superior class of textbooks available in Pakistan. This
quotation gives us an inkling of the core issue that maligned
Basic Education so summarily in the perception of anti-
Congress Muslims in 1937. It is a perception with which
the writers of these textbooks apparently identify. The
core issue was the absence of religious instruction in 'Basic'
schools. It is interesting to recall that Gandhi had deliberately
left out religious instruction from his scheme. On being
asked by a group of visitors why he had done so, he told
them: 'We have left out the teaching of religion from the
Wardha Scheme of education because we are afraid that
religions as they are taught and practiced today lead to
conflict rather than unity. But on the other hand I hold
that the truths that are common to all religions can and
should be taught to all children. These truths cannot be
taught through words or through books-the children can
learn these truths only through the daily life of the teacher. '23
Even if we assume that the negative perception of
Gandhi's scheme arose mainly from its avoidance of religious
instruction, the intensity with which the scheme is
condemned in Pakistani textbooks calls for further scrutiny.
It is clear from the quotations given above that the pedagogic
aspects of Basic Education have no interest for these school
historians. Their concern is confined to the ethos in which
the scheme was put into practice and which, in their
judgement, it was supposed to reinforce. The policy to
favour Hindi, the respect shown to Gandhi's ideals-which

were, of course, the same as the Congress party's declared
ideals-and the singing of Vande Mataram were among the
major ingredients of that ethos. Hussain's textbook, which
cares for details and explanation in almost every other
context that we have examined so far, is unusually brief
and shrill on this matter. This is all it has to say about the
functioning of Congress ministries:
Once in power from 1937 to 1939, the Congress
ministries in the Hindu majority areas confirmed
the Muslims' fears. They were corrupt,
discriminatory, and terribly insensitive. Hindi
replaced Urdu as the language of provincial
governments and the medium of instruction.
Gandhi's picture hung everywhere, and Congress
party's flags flew from public buildings. An anti-
Mughal poem, written by a Hindu extremist, was
adopted as the national anthem. Particularly in the
UP, the Muslim elites were shocked to find their
power, laboriously built up since the days of Sir
Sayyid, suddenly_ lost to Congress. 24
Although this excerpt from Hussain's book is quite out of
tune with the general style and approach of her book-in
the sense that the patience for explaining and the specificity
of detail we see elsewhere is missing here.....:.it does impel us
to look more deeply at the 1937-39 period, particularly at
the implementation of the Wardha Scheme. We will do
that with the help of two extraneous sources: one Indian,
the other Pakistani. The first is a memoir by M. Mujeeb to
which we have referred earlier. 25 This memoir is important
for us in the present context because Mujeeb's own
contribution to Basic Education is _well known. Not only
188 Rival Histories
was he the Vice-Chancellor of Jamia Millia lslamia, an

institution where the Wardha Scheme found some of its
most committed exponents, he also wrote a biography of
Zakir Husain which gives considerable attention to the
latter's experience as the chairman of the Wardha Education
Committee. 26 Few people today seem aware of the enormous
work Zakir Husain did to popularize Basic Education
against all odds-both institutional and socio-political.
Mujeeb commemorates Husain's work in as objective a
manner as one might think possible. Given this background,
it is important that we listen to Mujeeb's memory of 1937-
39 when Basic Education was introduced as a policy of
Congress governments.
Mujeeb draws the general picture of the ethos in the
United Provinces by recalling a variety of changes that
were taking place. In the sphere of political culture, he
recalls 'something unbearably upstartish' in the behaviour
of Congress underlings. In the sphere of language, he
records that 'Urdu lost its legal position almost overnight'.
He talks about the impact of land reforms undertaken by
the Congress which hurt the land-owning Muslim upper
class.27 As it is, this class was feeling nervous in the face of
the overwhelming mass support the Congress had received
in the elections. Most of the new leaders of the Congress,
Mujeeb recalls, were not known to the Muslims, hence
they were regarded 'not persons, but just Hindus'. Ml;ljeeb's
memory draws the picture of a nervous, beleaguered elite
taking recourse to mobilizing mass support by making an
appeal to Islam as it had done earlier at the time of
Khilafat, but this time, the source of threat was cited as
being nearer home. Indignation, fear and anger took the
help of rumours, and this is how popular im~gination
perceived Gandhi's scheme of Basic Education:
When some Muslim critics of the scheme of basic

education came across the recommendation in the
syllabus of basic education that movements to the
rhythm of music or elementary dance movements
should form part of the physical culture activities
in the school, they picked upon it as an indication
that in the new schools Muslim girls would be
forced to learn dancing. No deductions made from
this could be too wild, and basic education stood
condemned not only as an attack on Muslimculture
but on all ideas of decency. 28
Around the same time, Mujeeb recalls, the Chief Minister
of the Central Provinces, Ravi Shankar Shukla, introduced
a scheme to seek land endowments for schools from the
local people. 'These schools were to be called Vidya Mandirs
or temples (lit. houses) of knowledge,' Mujeeb says. Though
these schools had no relation to the national policy of
Basic Education, 'they were criticised by the Muslims as an
attempt to turn schools into temples'. Mujeeb concludes
·this recollection by saying:
These were the major 'atrocities' to which others
were added, and the fuse was lighted for the
explosion which ultimately split up the common
country into India and Pakistan. 29
Going by Mujeeb's memoir, it becomes e~sy to guess why
Indian school texts do not record the memory of Basic
Education. If indeed the scheme made so vital a contribution
to the larger processes that led to Partition that a nationalist
Indian Muslim like Mujeeb has no reluctance testifying it,
it does make sense why school histories written for Indian
children would choose to 'forget' it. They are, after all,
histories of India's national movement, not histories of
190 Rival Histories
India's Partition. The burden of explaining Partition falls

on the shoulders of Pakistan's school historians, and they
carry it by identifying fully with the voices of 1937-39 that
spread the amazing stories of Basic Education Mujt;eb has
illustrated. Education symbolizes the future, and those
who saw Basic Education as a scheme to alienate Muslim
children from their culture and religion must have perceived
it as a critical moment to wake up.
The second source that throws some light on the
contribution that Basic Education made to the ethos of the
late 1930s is a novel by Mumtaz Shah Navraz who died in
1949 at ~he age of thirty-five. Her novel, The Heart Divided,
from which we will quote an excerpt concerning the
Wardha Scheme, was written between 1943 and 1948. It
was some time in the early 1940s that Mumtaz Shah
Nawaz shifted her political loyalties from the Congress to
the Muslim League. Her novel, popularized in recent years
by a feminist organization in Pakistan, presents the story
of three sisters who fared very differently in the 1930s.
Many of the events are presented from the perspective of
Zohra, a modern, politically sensitive college student who
appears to be the autobiographical voice of the novelist. 30
The following conversation takes place in Patna when
Zohra's sister, Sughra, goes there all the way from Lahore
to watch the Muslim League's annual session in 1938. She
stays with her cousin, Saida, whose husband is a young,
politically active lawyer. He invites a number of his friends,
some of whom have come from other towns as Sughra has
in order to attend the League's session. Here is how they
talk about Basic Education:
'Life under the Congress regime is becoming
impossible,' said one young man. 'We cannot go
on like this. Something drastic will have to be
done.' 'Things are getting worse each day', said

another, who had come from Nagpur, 'and it is the
same in all the minority provinces. Muslims cannot
get justice or even decent treatment under the
Congress governments. To my mind this acceptance
of the Vidya Mandir Scheme is just about the limit.
If we accept this, we shall lose for ever our language,
our culture, and in time our children will even
forget their own faith .. .'
'Forgive my ignorance,' said Sughra, 'but what
exactly is the Vidya Mandir Scheme? Of course I
have seen from the papers that there has been a
storm of protest against it among the Muslims and
they mention its many obnoxious features, but
exactly what are they?'
'It's a part of the Wardha Scheme of education. To
begin with, we object to schools becoming mandir
(temple), then images of the so-called goddess of
learning are installed there and our children are
taught idolatrous worship before these and also
made to bow and kneel before images and
photographs of Gandhi.'
'Not really?'
'That is by no means all! Our children are forced
to discard all tokens of their own religion and
culture, just imagine they have to give up even
their traditional greeting-Aslam-o-Alaikum, but
are made to sing the Bande Ma tram every day.'
'What tyranny!'
.'The whole educational plan is calculated to destroy
Muslim culture, learning and religion. Urdu has
been replaced by Hindi which is something called
192 Rival Histories
Hindustani to mislead people, even from there

words of Persian and Arabic are being weeded out.
Perhaps the worst thing is the way history books
have been changed. There is gross abuse of Muslim
kings and emperors, and our national heroes are
derided .. .' 31
If we read this fictionalized conversation along with

Mujeeb's memoir, we can construct a slice of the ethos
which prevailed among the Muslim elite in the late 1930s.
It is the same ethos that we find depicted in today's
Pakistani textbooks. Evidently, the Pakistani school
historians have chosen to look at the late 1930s, particularly
at the Wardha Scheme, entirely from the perspective of the
Muslim elite of that period. A balanced historical perspective
would allow the young Pakistani readers of today to realize
that Gandhi's scheme fell victim to the contemporary
milieu-both in terms of its application, especially in the
Central Provinces, and also in terms of its perception. In
that case, the Pakistani text authors might also consider
sparing an appreciative word for Gandhi's real intention
and strategy, and perhaps for the efforts that Zakir Husain
made to dispel the misconceptions that plagued the scheme.
But then, the Pakistani school historian would not be
writing a narrative tuned to the national ideology. A
parallel hypothetical case can be made for the Indian
historians who choose to ignore the Wardha Scheme, as
well as the ethos which it had the misfortune to face.
The significance that Pakistani textbooks attach to the
late 1930s calls for a critical review of the overall epistemic
character of 'Pakistan Studies'. The significance of the
1937-39 period is expressed both by the space given to the
events of this period and the tone in which they are
reported. Both suggest the view that the experiences of this

period had a decisive influence on the demand for a
separate Muslim state even though the seeds of this demand
or its urge had existed earlier. It is interesting to ask
whether the textbooks are telling children how the story of
Pakistan unfolded, or are they showing how the probability
of a united India gaining freedom declined? The first
interpretation would mean that the textbooks are presenting
a teleologically conceived history, which treats the eventual
outcome as destiny and, that the teacher is expected to
show how this destiny was fulfilled. In this view of the
past, events have limited significance, for they are
conceptualized as examples of a tendency, not as specific
happening~. If the second interpretation is upheld, it would
imply that each event had its own character and impact
which need assessment. The second interpretation also
implies that the historian is not being guided by an
ideological commitment to the supreme political correctness
of the outcome.
Looking at the treatment of the 1937-39 period in
Pakistani textbooks, one feels that their authors are deeply
ambivalent. As we have noticed in the context of several
earlier occasions, Pakistani textbook writers are ideologically
committed to the theoretical basis of Pakistan. This is clear
from the lengthy projections they make into the past in
search of the seeds of the idea of Pakistan. We are not
talking here about writers who spot the idea of Pakistan as
early as the ninth century. We are referring to the writers
of more sober textbooks, some of whom explain why the
Congress ministries resigned by referring to the war. These
textbooks explain the Congress's policy towards the war in
greater detail than several Indian textbooks do. Bajwa's
textbook devotes a paragraph to the terms Jinnah conveyed
194 Rival Histories
to the Congress in November 1939-a month before the

Congress ministries resigned-for a settlement. Bajwa says,
'With the Congress in no mood to compromise with
British, it was hardly surprising that they did not respond
positively to Jinnah's offer.' He also quotes Nehru who
said, after the League had called for a celebration on the
end of the Congress rule, that there now seemed to be 'no
common ground' between the two parties. Other textbooks
focus on the Quaid's call, and by laying stress on the
'tyranny and oppression' of the Congress rule, they pass a
decisive negative judgement on the short-lived Congress-
League cooperation during the 1920s. Even others, who see
the seeds of Pakistan in the post-1857 years or in 1906, are
surprisingly keen to portray the late 1930s in a manner
that would suggest the possibility of India emerging into
freedom as a single country, if only the Congress had
behaved differently after its victory in 1937.
10
Glory and Grief
The Final Years
At no earlier point did the Indian and the Pakistani

narratives look so irreconcilable as they did in their coverage
of the late 1930s. Having gone through this patch, one feels
psychologically prepared to find even greater contrast in
the rest of the two master narratives. One presumes that
the narrative of freedom, for the seven years that remain,
is going to be starkly different in the two sets of textbooks.
Our prior knowledge of the end and of the rapid course of
events which preceded it also predisposes us to expect a
sharp contrast between the Indian and the Pakistani
narratives. As Independence draws close, we imagine that
the text writers would view it in the light of the supreme
clarity that belongs, in any grand narrative, to the end
alone.
As the two narratives enter the early 1940s, they fulfil
196 Rival Histories
our expectation of finding a sharp contrast between the

national perspectives embedded in them. The expansive
character that the Pakistani narrative acquires at this point
has been mentioned earlier. The Indian narrative, by
contrast, acquires an unusual reluctance to divulge details.
However, both maintain a selective silence on certain
events and on the probable causes of these events.
Disinterestedness in the 'other' grows fast as we hurtle
towards the decisive mid-1940s. Well before reaching the
point at which a formal division took place, the memory
covering the jointly experienced past gets divided.
Quit India
In Indian textbooks, the early 1940s are remembered
primarily for the Quit India movement. It is reconstructed
as a grand event which highlights the spirit of adventure
that is the leitmotif of the Indian narrative of freedom.
After the rejection of the Cripps Mission, the young reader
learns about the popular mood as being one of discontent
and anger.
The Class XII NCERT text tells its readers with
confidence that while the people of India 'fully sympathised
with the anti-fascist forces, they felt that the existing
political situation in the country had become intolerable'.
This text is among the few which mention, even if only in
passing, the impact of wartime shortages and rising prices.
The atmosphere of anxiety and frustration that most other
Lextbooks construct is mainly political, with Gandhi serving
as a hero whose feelings, thoughts and words are said to be
one with the people's. Bagli's textbook quotes Gandhi's
remark: 'Leave India in God's hands, or in modern parlance,
to anarchy. Then all parties will fight one another like
dogs, or will, when- real responsibility faces them, come to
reasonable agreement.' The Indian people, this text says,
Glory and Grief: The Final Years 197
confirmed 'with their blood' the Congress resolution to

force the English to leave India immediately.
In terms of the narrative of the freedom movement,
the nature and structure of the Quit India movement
makes it a perfect topic for detailed treatment by school
historians. All the key elements of the narrative established
so far-adventure, heroism, moral struggle and
determination-find flamboyant expression in the reporting
of the Quit India movement. No wonder its representation
in textbooks overshadows every other detail relevant to
the study of the early 1940s. First, its name evokes the
image of a nation that has made up its mind. Translated
into Hindi, it becomes even more evocative. The title is
self-explanatory and makes no demand that we first make
sense of the background, as was the case with the salt
satyagraha. As an idea, 'Quit India' personifies the rejection
of any need to come to terms with someone whose
presence is not appreciated. Secondly, Gandhi's exhortation
to 'do or die', which most Indian texts mention, gives an
added ring of finality. Apart from these formal features,
the Quit India movement was also marked by events
which excite the imagination of young readers. Not just
demonstrations and strikes, but repressive violence on a
shocking scale sets apart this final anti-colonial rebellion.
The measures taken by the British administration to suppress
it, such as mass shooting, torture and air strikes, make the
August rebellion a uniquely heroic national memory of the
final phase of British rule in India. 1
The dramatic confrontation between heroic sacrifice
and brutal repression, which made the Quit India movement
such a momentous event, can be held responsible for the
Indian school historian's inability to represent it as a
political event. In one textbook after another we find the
198· Rival Histories
Quit India movement portrayed exclusively as the ultimate

patriotic adventure with no trace of politics. The portrait
can hardly bear the inclusion of background factors, such
as the despair and gloom that had descended on the
Congress after the failure of the Cripps Mission's visit, and
Gandhi's mid-1942 impression that the Allied forces were
going to lose the war. 2 The Indian school historian also
eliminates other inconvenient facts, such as the deep doubts
that leaders like Nehru and Rajagopalachari had about the
correctness of Gandhi's approach.
Quit India is described in Indian textbooks in a purely
celebratory manner, allowing no questions on issues like
Gandhi's willingness to risk violence, in total contrast to
his earlier stance during Civil Disobedience and Non-
cooperation. Perhaps more than any other event of modern
Indian history, Quit India, as represented in school
textbooks, shows that the freedom struggle is not supposed
to be taught or learnt as history, but rather as a moral tale
with historical content. In most textbooks used in India,
Quit India is followed by a substantial section on the
Indian National Army (INA). Once again, in this section
we are struck by the school historians' willingness to
assume the role of storyteller, their excitement over the
design of an event clouding their responsibility as
interpreters of the past. To the young reader of these texts,
it could well seem as if the spirit of Quit India, led by
Gandhi, was carried forward by the INA, led by Subhas
Chandra Bose. No author reminds the student that there
was no similarity of perspective between Gandhi and Bose.
Only the senior-level text by Bipan Chandra makes the
appreciable effort to tackle the problem by saying that
even though Bose's strategy 'of winning freedom by
cooperation with fascist powers was criticised at the time
Glory and Grief The Final Years 199
by most Indian nationalists, by organising the INA he set

an inspiring example to the Indian people and the Indian
Army'.
Lahore Resolution
It is little wonder that while covering these heady portions
of the history of the early 1940s, authors of Indian textbooks
'forget' to mention the strides made by the Muslim League
since the late 1930s. We have to turn to Pakistani textbooks
to get news of the Lahore Resolution: hardly any Indian
text gives it. Every Pakistani textbook virtually stops the
narrative flow in order to celebrate the Lahore Resolution.
We hear about its historic significance before we are given
its content and an elaborate comment on its spirit. Just as
Indian textbooks specify the Gawalia Tank Maidan as the
venue of Gandhi's 8 August speech, Pakistani texts name
Minto Park (now Iqbal Park where the Minar-e-Pakistan
stands) as the venue where the Lahore Resolution was
passed on 23 March 1940. The Lahore Resolution stands
like a commanding peak in the landscape of the early 1940s
in Pakistani textbooks just as the Quit India movement
does in the Indian textbooks. This basic difference is
indicative of the rival landscapes in which the last phase of
the freedom movement unfolds in the two sets of school
textbooks.
Unlike Indian textbooks which represent this phase in
continuity with the previous one, Pakistani texts frame the
1940s as a distinct period. What is new about it, according
to them, is the clarity and cohesiveness that the Muslim
League attained following its experience of the two years of
Congress rule. This clarity was not born of a new vision
or realization; rather, it is said to have resulted from the
removal of doubts and illusions. Indeed, most textbooks
200 Rival Histories
examined in this study refer at this point to the earlier

incarnations of the two-nation theory and the idea of
Partition, starting with Syed Ahmad Khan. Surprisingly,
textbooks as different as Bajwa's and the one by Rabbani
and Sayyid share the choice of 23 March 1940 as a moment
to take a long look at the past in search of the seeds of the
two-nation theory. Bajwa casts his gaze backwards in time,
as well as around at developments in other parts of the
world in search of supporting ideas for the incipient
nationhood of the yet-unborn Pakistan. He makes a vague
reference to Europe after the first war, suggesting that
'religion, not allegiance to a community or culture was a
motivating force for nationalism, not just in the Indian
subcontinent but in other parts of the world as well'.
Without offering an example-obviously because there are
none-he moves on to suggest that Sir Syed Ahmad Khan
was 'the first Muslim who deserves credit for pointing out
that Hindus and Muslims, by the standards of modern
nationalism, were separate nations'. References to Rahmat
Ali and Iqbal follow, and finally Bajwa mentions the
change that occurred in Jinnah's perspective as a result of
his 'better experience of dealing with Congress leaders'.
The conclusion offered to children is that now, in March
1940, it became clear that the Muslim League 'would push
for independence not only from the British but also from
the Hindus'.
We can identify in Bajwa's discussion of the Lahore
Resolution the dominant tone of the Pakistani master
narrative of freedom in this final patch. It is primarily an
explanatory tone. It stands in direct contrast to the note of
indifference towards the Lahore Resolution that we find in
the Indian textbooks. The indifference of Indian authors
serves to push the two-nation theory to the margins of the
narrative. On the other hand, the Pakistani authors appear
to be gripped at this juncture by the urge to trace and re-

trace the familiar record of past references to Hindu-
Muslim differences and the idea of Partition. These
references are strung together so as to make them look like
a continuous trajectory. In a number of Pakistani textbooks
the trajectory includes not just Sir Syed Ahmad Khan,
Iqbal, and Rahmat Ali, but Lajpat Rai and Savarkar as well.
These last two names are simply never mentioned in
Indian textbooks in the context of the idea of Partition,
not even by those authors who emphasize the contribution
made by Hindu revivalist-nationalists towards the worsening
of Hindu-Muslim hostilities in politics.
The discourse and the role of Hindu nationalism get
far greater attention in Pakistani textbooks; but then, the
brush used by Pakistani authors is too thick to show the
difference between the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha.
Pakistani textbook authors simply adopt Jinnah's stance.
From the 1930s onwards, he insisted on calling Gandhi a
Hindu leader and the Congress a Hindu party. This is
what Pakistani textbook writers do. Indian textbook writers,
on the other hand, use the secular-communal duality to
distinguish the Congress from both the League and the
Hindu Mahasabha. This classification is, in its own way,
too coarse to highlight the finer points of difference between
the pressures that plagued the Congress from outside and
the ones that troubled it from within.
Quit India is mentioned in all Pakistani textbooks, but
unlike the Indian account, it is a detached, uninspiring
story. As one goes through the few lines that cover the
massive repression that took place during the August and
September of 1942, one is reminded of the passage of time
since the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre. The brutality of that
incident finds a mention characteristically different from
202 Rival Histories
the reference that the repression following the Quit India

rebellion receives in Pakistani textbooks. We can deafly
see how, as an instrument of shaping collective memory,
history textbooks play an active role by discriminating
between victims of violent repression in two episodes on
the basis of the political conditions surrounding them. The
only exception is J. Hussain's textbook which gives a
realistic estimate of the number of people, including women,
killed by the British, in the August of 1942. She does, of
course, record the Muslim League's condemnation of the
Quit India movement. She also mentions the fact, as few
other Pakistani school historians do, that the Muslim
League 'was happy to benefit from the inactivity of the
Congress while its leaders were under arrest'. This little tail
of a sentence is the only one we can find, in the two sets
of textbooks put together, hinting at the momentous
political change that occurred in the years following the
Quit India movement.
How the Congress and the League acquired an equal
status in their negotiations with the British during the final
rounds of the politics of the freedom struggle, how the
Muslim League became a mass party before the election of
1946, and why Gandhi did not attempt to stage a mass
movement to keep India united, are among the teasing
questions that many youngsters in both countries may ask,
but neither textbooks nor teachers, who are constrained by
these textbooks, are equipped to· answer.
Indian Brevity
The pace at which Indian textbook accounts of the final
stage of the freedom movement move is so fast that many
of the salient political events of this period are reduced to
nominal mention. The details offered are so sketchy and
Glory and Grief The Final Yearr 203
the account so brief, that a student who may want to make

sense of thest' events and judge the relative importance of
each development in the chain of events that led to
Independence and Partition, can only get puzzled. The
Cabinet Mission and the complex plan it proposed are
mentioned in Indian textbooks, but what precisely the plan
was, and why it failed are left unexplained. To grasp what
the Cabinet Mission was proposing for maintaining India's
unity is not easy; it requires an acquaintance with several
basic details of the proposal. Why it failed is an even more
demanding question that requires a painstaking review of
the response it received from the two major parties. Such
a review can hardly be made without acknowledging the
claims and counter-claims made by contemporary
commentators and historians. 3
Why Indian school historians do not treat the Cabinet
Mission plan as a historical event important enough to
deserve careful attention is a question we cannot hope to
answer in isolation from the general treatment that events
of this period receive in Indian textbooks. Before making
that attempt, let us see an example or two of how the
Cabinet Mission is represented. Here is the entire description
of its proposal given in the senior-level NCERT text by
Bipan Chandra:
The Cabinet Mission proposed a two-tiered
federation which was expected to maintain national
unity while conceding the largest · measure of
regional autonomy. There was to be a federation of
the provinces and the States with the federal centre
controlling only defence, foreign affairs and
communications. At the same time, individual
provinces could form regional unions to which
they could surrender by mutual agreement some of
their powers. 4
204 Rival Histories
The shorthand style adopted in this description of seventy

words continues in the next one hundred words or so
which brings the student as far forward as June 1948-the
date initially set for India's Independence by Clement
Attlee in February 1947. These hundred words include an
explanation of why the Cabinet Mission failed, the different
interpretations of the Mission plan by the Congress and
the League, the formation of the interim government, the
boycott of the Constituent Assembly by the League, and,
finally, Attlee's declaration. The plight of the student who
might want to know what lies behind this hurriedly drawn
thumb-nail sketch with just one hundred words can be
imagined. Apparently, the textbook does not anticipate
that students of Class XII might wish to comprehend the
1945-47 period of the nationalist movement, rather than
merely know about some of the developments of this
period. Other events, like the Simla Conference, the election
held for the Central Assembly, and the 3rd June plan are
not even mentioned. The Gandhi-Jinnah talks in 1944 are
also erased from record.
Other Indian textbooks, with few exceptions, use
variations of this shorthand style. In the UP textbook for
high school students, the Cabinet Mission plan forms the
opening topic of a new chapter called 'Independent India-
1947'. The brief opening paragraph informs the reader that
the Indian federation envisaged in the Muslim League
proposal would have divided the country into four zones.
The Constituent Assembly proposed by the Mission, this
textbook says, was to be elected by provincial legislatures
on the basis of 'communal electorates' and the Congress,
despite its consistent insistence on the demand for a
Constituent Assembly elected on the basis of adult franchise,
accepted the Mission proposal in order to avoid a delay in
Independence. The Tamil Nadu textbook for high school

students says that the Cabinet Mission 'recommended the
formation of provinces based on the majority of Hindus
and Muslims' (sic). Most other textbooks have similar
cryptic summaries of the Mission plan. Two exceptions are
the !CSE textbook by Perin Bagli and Somendralal Roy's
textbook for high school students of West Bengal. Both
texts give readers a comprehensible set of basic details,
though compression and vagueness characterize their
discussion of the reasons why the Mission plan did not
work. At least a part of the nebulousness must be attributed
to the textbook writers' reluctance to hold the Congress in
any way responsible for the failure of the Mission plan.
This reluctance compels the writers of school textbooks to
forego an opportunity to let the student see how difficult
the tasks of decision-making, bargaining, and
communication had become in the political climate of the
mid-1940s.
Analysts of this period have emphasized these
difficulties, both within the Congress and in Congress-
League relations. 5 By failing to acquaint the student with
these difficulties, school texts mislead the young readers
into thinking that the proposals of the Cabinet Mission,
and the final plan to divide India were matters on which
clear terms like 'rejection' and 'acceptance' can be applied
in an everyday sense. The student is also deprived of the
opportunity to think in terms of counterfactuals and to ask
whether India would have stayed united for long if the
Cabinet Mission plan had worked. 6
The treatment given in Indian textbooks to the Cabinet
Mission and other sub-topics pertaining to the history of
this period are inevitably structured around the anxiety to
explain why the Congress accepted Partition. This question
is embedded at a deep level in the structure of the treatment
,..
206 Rival Histories
given to Partition. It is wrapped around another question

which has a place in the popular imagination of the north
Indian middle class: 'Why did Gandhiji accept Partition?'
By addressing these questions in a tacit manner, school
historians attempt to negotiate a labyrinth of assumptions
and aims. One aim is to deny the validity of the two-nation
theory while explaining why Partition was accepted by
nationalist leaders like Gandhi and Nehru. That the
Partition took place and that it is a historical fact is wound
up in the nationalist narrative with, a sense of guilt which
stems from the underlying assumption that Partition was
not entirely inevitable, and that it was allowed to take
place. The tenor of the larger narrative of the freedom
struggle demands that each major step towards Independence
is portrayed as a self-consciously intended goal of the
Congress which was leading the struggle. This tenor is
mai_ntained by upholding the view that the Congress rejected
a number of proposals made by the British which were not
in the best interests of the country. The Cripps Mission
and the Cabinet Mission represented two such proposals.
The cursory mention of these missions in most Indian
school books enables the writers to sustain the general
message of the narrative that the Congress never rested till
it got what it wanted. This message imposes on the school
historian the onus of explaining why the Congress could
not reject Partition.
Apart from this compulsion, the school historian is
also under a moral pressure. In substance, this has to do
with the opposition between 'nationalism' and
'communalism' maintained throughout the narrative.
'Nationalism' is represented as a source of inspiration
which is morally superior to 'communalism'. The
superiority arises out of the largeness of the vision that
'nationalism', particularly its socially transformative

potential, implies. Communalism is represented as a reaction,
a regressive effort seeking inspiration from a mythologized
past rather than from a rational vision of the future.
Nationalism, in its secular character, implies a spirit which
transcends older, primordial categories of social life, some
of which are based on religion. Since secular nationalism is
a superior force, its proponents' acceptance of a proposal
based on religious differences calls for an explanation. In
this instance, secular nationalism cannot be portrayed as
having achieved what it stood for; its behaviour smacks of
defeat or compromise which demands an explanation.
The explanation given has two parts. The first one
makes a distinction between the 'acceptance' of an
impending course of events and 'acceptance' of the
inspiration that this impending course was based on. The
second part consists of mitigating the scale of the success
which the morally inferior idea of communalism achieved
by forcing Partition. Indian textbooks emphasiz.e that
though the Congress agreed to the division of the cou~try,
it rejected the two-nation theory on which the division was
based. The 'rejection' of the two-nation theory is represented
as a continued assertion by the Congress of its long-held
principles. The acceptance of Partition is attributed to
compelling circumstances which left no other alternative.
'The nationalist leaders agreed to the Partition of India in
order to avoid the large-scale bloodbath that communal
riots threatened,' says the NCERT text for Class XII,
adding in the next sentence: 'But they did not accept the
two-nation theory.' Anxious lest the point might be missed,
the text goes on to say, assuming the role of the nationalist
leaders, that they 'accepted Partition not because there
were two-nations in India-a Hindu nation and a Muslim
208 Rival Histories
nation-but because the historical development of

communalism, both Hindu and Muslim, over the past 70
years or so had created a situation where the alternative to
Partition was mass killing of lakhs of innocent people in
senseless and barbaric communal riots' .7
Two more reasons are given. One is that the riots were
not confined to one part of India, or else the Congress
leaders would have fought to contain them; they had
spread everywhere. Secondly, the country was still under
alien rulers who were content to carry on their divisive
policies, perhaps with an eye on the future of the two
newly independent nation-states. Thus, the compulsion of
circumstances, or the absence of alternatives for the
Congress, is argued as being linked to the threat of
uncontrollable Hindu-Muslim violence. The text writer
appears to be saying to his young readers that Partition was
an outcome of circumstances, not the failure of the
Congress's ideology. Other textbooks follow a similar line.
For instance, the UP textbook reminds the reader that
Hindus and Muslims cannot be said to have formed two
nations for they had been part of a shared culture during
medieval times, and had fought together in the 1857 revolt
as well as later.
Ironically, the 'circumstances' invoked in order to
explain the 'acceptance' of Partition remain tightly wound
up with the demands of narratology. Excessive brevity
helps to mystify the political circumstances, including the
role that earlier developments had played in shaping them.
The manner in which individual personalities, including
the British players, behaved also remains untouched. Indian
textbooks unanimously avoid discussing Gandhi's dilemma,
which arose from his awareness that the idea of Partition
had popular sanction. In her study of pre-Partition politics,
Sucheta Mahajan says: 'The real tragedy, as Gandhi realised

all along {but not his critics) was that his alienation from
his colleagues reflected his alienation from the people.
Leaders reflected popular opinion not only in their
acceptance of the Partition, but in their more pragmatic
approach to political questions and in their imperfect
practice of non-violence. ' 8
It is true that a great deal of historical research on
Partition such as Mahajan's has come to light long after
some of the textbooks analysed in the present study were
originally written. This justification is useful, but it leaves
enough room to _notice the influence of narratological and
ideological compulsions on the portrayal of Partition-
related events, including Gandhi's assassination. 9 Both these
compulsions are evident in the school historian's decision
to keep the development of both Hindu and Muslim
communalism out of the main story of nationalism. The
sharp separation of 'secular' and 'communal' politics is a
corollary of this decision. Though inspired by the ideology
of secularism, this binary separation makes it difficult for
the young generation studying the history of the freedom
movement today to appreciate the nature of the battle in
which leaders like Gandhi, Nehru and Azad were engaged.
Gandhi's case is particularly noteworthy. The impression
that Gandhi was in full command of the Congress and the
people in general burdens the historical figure of Gandhi
with an unduly large share of responsibility for allowing
Partition.
Pakistani Profusion
While the Indian narrative implicitly attributes to Gandhi
the power to prevent Partition, both Indian and Pakistani
textbooks ascribe the accomplishment of Partition to Jinnah.
210 Rival Histories
Personification of historical destiny is rarely so succinct as

in this case. Indian textbooks refer to Jinnah with articulate
resentment. In Pakistani texts, he is portrayed as nothing
less than a semi-divine visionary who succeeded against all
odds in getting what he wanted. He stands in sharp
contrast to Gandhi who, in the Indian textbook version of
history, failed to fulfil the expectation he symbolized, in
equally superhuman terms. This contrast comes across as
the central allegory of both Indian and Pakistani textbooks.
Underneath it, however, we find in Pakistani textbooks a
complexity similar to what we have discussed earlier in the
case of Indian textbooks. It arises rather more from
ideological compulsions than from the demands of the
narrative of freedom.
The narrative, which traces the beginning of the freedom
struggle to 1857, alludes to the two-nation theory soon
after the discussion of the 1857 revolt, citing Syed Ahmad
Khan as its earliest proponent. By the time the narrative
reaches the early 1940s, it has already used the theory a few
times to convey a sense of inevitable destiny. By dwelling
on the Lahore Resolution (it is referred to as the Pakistan
Resolution in most textbooks), the narrative equips itself
with a new kind of political content representing the will
and determination of a man of vision. All along, the
narrative of freedom is structured around the promise or
certainty of its conclusion. So strongly and repeatedly does
the narrative refer to Pakistan as a goal recognized from
the beginning of the freedom struggle, that the only curiosity
it can satisfy in the final episode is about how the goal was
ultimately attained. Yet, when it comes, the final episode
carries the message that Pakistan was the outcome of
Hindu intransigence expressed in the unaccommodative
attitude of the Congress. Far from looking like inevitable
Glory and Grief: The Final Years 211
destiny, Pakistan becomes, in this portion of textbook

historiography, a product of political happenings which
could well have led to some other outcome.
There is, thus, a deep irony in Pakistan's school
historiography as it deals with Partition and Independence.
First, there is the irony about Jinnah. His own uncertainty
and anguish cannot be fully represented, for it would show
his struggle as being merely political. Historian Ayesha
J alal has traced the nature of this struggle in her study of
Jinnah, focusing on the evolution of his strategy and
intentions. 10 Other studies of the League's pre-Partition
politics also show that the trajectory of events took shape
in response to several factors; that it was not a pre-planned
'attainment' in any sense. 11 The demand for Pakistan
remained both geographically and politically vague right
up to the end, and that was one reason why Jinnah and
others were disappointed when the boundaries were drawn:
Rabbani and Sayyid's textbook quotes Jinnah to convey
this disappointment, and like several other textbooks,
discusses the Radcliffe Award at length. That Jinnah had to
compromise with a situation he did not approve of is
mentioned as a Hindu-British conspiracy. S.F. Mahmud,
for instance, says that Mountbatten told Jinnah to accept
what was offered or else the British would 'leave India to
the Hindus'. The textbook published by the Punjab Board
says that 'the Congress leaders cajoled Mountbatten to
favour them' and he, in turn, 'pressurised Radcliffe to
allocate many Muslim majority districts of East Punjab to
India and deprive Pakistan of the water of Sutlej, Bias and
Ravi'. Despite the need to acknowledge such blemishes in
the achievement, every textbook winds up the story of
Partition by hailing the fact that Jinnah gave Muslims their
own separate homeland where their identity would be
212 Rival Histories
secure. Zafar's textbook reminds the young student that

the 'Quaid-e-Azam brought the vision of Sir Syed and the
dream of Allama Iqbal into reality.'
Another aspect of the irony has to do with the portrayal
of the pre-Partition years as a period of shrewd manoeuvre.
Every Pakistani textbook gives elaborate details of each
political event that occurred in this period. Once the
narratives of freedom enter the post-war period, the contrast
between the brevity of the Indian text·Jooks and the
leisurely dilation one sees in the Pakistani texts gets
increasingly sharp. It looks as if Pakistar.i school historians
want to stop at each major date while their Indian
counterparts want to rush to the end.
Almost every Pakistani textbook earmarks five or six
times the space devoted in Indian textbooks for the
discussion of the Cabinet Mission plan. This plenitude of
the account necessarily imparts to Pakistani narratives a
justificatory ring. Each issue and opportunity is discussed
as an occasion to recall the skill of political manoeuvre that
the League was able to display. Regional narratives also
receive generous space, something we see only in token
quantities in Indian texts. The intention of not letting the
Congress get its way, despite the alleged British backing, is
emphasized in most Pakistani accounts. Let us see, for
instance, Bajwa's description of how the Muslim League
behaved when it finally agreed, under Wavell's persuasion,
to become a part of the interim government.
Liaquat Ali Khan took the finance portfolio offered

by the Congress who had hoped that a Muslim
would be unable to cope with such a technical
subject. It was a decision they soon regretted as
Liaquat was assisted by competent senior Muslim
civil servants and was able to make life very difficult

for Congress ministers requiring money for their
departments!1 2
Even without the mark of exclamation at the end, the text

writer's delight over the finance minister's endeavour, to
wreck the interim government's functioning from within,
is evident.
An alternative depiction of this episode appears in the
following manner in J. Hussain's text:
At the centre the finance minister, Liaquat Ali

Khan presented a budget on 1 March based mainly
on Congress's own campaign promises. The budget
horrified many wealthy Congress representatives,
who had not expected the Congress platform to be
implemented. 13
Hussain's textbook uses this and other happenings, including

the resignation of the Unionist Party government in Punjab
and the communal violence that broke out subsequently,
to reconstruct the spring of 1947. She attempts to provide
the young reader with a multi-focus description which
highlights one by one, the Congress-League, the British-
Indian, the Hindu-Muslim and the Sikh-Muslim dimensions
of the mounting tension. How it pushed the Congress
towards accepting Partition is made clear enough, but the
text distorts the acceptance by calling it 'demand'. Hussain's
point is that Pakistan was not wrested by force or
manoeuvre; rather the complexity and compulsion of
circumstances created a consensus in its favour. This subtext
can be read throughout Hussain's treatment of the final
phase ~f the Pakistan Movement. In the context of the
North West Frontier Province, the subtext becomes very
214 Rival Histories
unsustainable indeed, particularly when it is place9 under

the sub-title 'Frontier demands Pakistan'. Hussain's attempt
to fit the NWFP story in the narrative of the Pakistan
Movement hinges on the impression that Mountbatten got
during his visit to Peshawar in April 1947. The League's
supporters shouted 'Mountbatten Zindabad'. He came back
convinced, Hussain says, that the League's civil disobedience
movement had paralysed the administration, and the popular
opinion was in favour of Pakistan.
Hussain is not alone among Pakistani textbook writers
to remember the NWFP at the time of Partition, and the
careful nudging of facts she indulges in for covering up the
Frontier tragedy has supporters among professional
historians. In his recent history of Pakistan, lan Talbot
indulges in the same exercise by saying that in the June
1947 referendum 'the province's Muslims voted
overwhelmingly for Pakistan'. 14 It is not hard to see how
inappropriate the term 'overwhelmingly' is in this claim.
Those who voted for the NWFP's merger with Pakistan
were 50.9 per cent, or a little above half a million people
who had the right to vote, and we must remember that the
Congress-which had won the 1946 election-had asked
for a boycott of the referendum. 15
Violence Sidelined
The NWFP story brings the Pakistani and the Indian
master narratives closer together, inasmuch as the former
distorts it and the latter overlooks its details. We have seen
instances of such commonality between the two master
narratives in several other contexts, but nowhere is it as
remarkable as in the cursory treatment of the holocaust
that followed Partition. The killing and uprootment of
millions of people receive no more than a few lines of
clerical mention in the textbooks of both countries. Between
the paragraph about the Mountbatten Plan and the Indian

Independence Act, most Indian school historians find no
space to devote to the mass killing, rapes and forced
migration that took place between 15 August 1947 and the
assassination of Mahatma Gandhi five and a half months
later. The politico-administrative character of school
historiography achieves unparalleled expression in the
maintenance of total silence on the human tragedy that
occurred at the time of Partition. Roy's textbQok for
Bengal and the state textbooks of UP for Classes VIII and
X offer stunning examples of this tendency though the
former describes the communal frenzy that occurred on
the Direct Action Day in Bengal in some detail. The state
textbook of Punjab uses half a sentence to acknowledge
'the loss of life and property' and the fact that lakhs were
rendered homeless.
The few texts which have a little more to say about the
holocaust do so in unevocative, cold words. The following
two sentences, taken from the Class VIII NCERT textbook,
are typical: 'Unfortunately, the victory of the glorious
struggle of the Indian people fat independence was tainted
by ugly happenings immediately before and after the
achievement of independence. Millions lost their homes,
several thousand persons were killed.' The senior-level
NCERT text adds a few adjectives and trite phrases like
'brother was torn from brother'. Perin Bagli also observes
great parsimony in her otherwise comprehensive text in
recording post-Partition violence. What distinguishes this
otherwise attractive text for !CSE students from other
Indian textbooks is its blatant one-sidedness in the
characterization of violence and displacement during
Partition. This is all we find in Bagli's textbook on how
Partition affected the people of India:
The Partition of the country which followed the
British withdrawal created new problems. There
were Hindu-Muslim riots in many places. Hindus
216 Rival Histories
in Pakistan were massacred in large numbers. Lakhs

of refugees came from Pakistan into India. There
were similar riots in Bengal. These were a complete
disgrace to humanity. 16
This kind of partial perspective is common in Pakistani

textbooks and so is the brevity. Rabbani and Sayyid's
textbook goes as far as claiming that 'the Hindus and Sikhs
had chalked out a systematic programme for the massacre
of Muslims'. Generally, Pakistani textbooks follow their
Indian counterparts in keeping the description of Partition
violence limited to a few unevocative words. These two
sentences from the Punjab state textbook are typical:
After the establishment of Pakistan the entire
subcontinent was engulfed in the communal riots.
The riots were widespread in Punjab, Delhi, Bengal
and Bl~ar in which fifteen lac people were
murdered, 50 thousand women were abducted and
,more than one crore people had to migrate. 17
The only textbooks that go a little beyond this kind of
bare mention are the ones by Bajwa and Hussain. They
discuss the riots and mass migration in the wider context
of the problem of rehabilitation. The details given are
somewhat more vivid, but the overall impression given
hardly suffices to distinguish the Partition riots from earlier
communal riots.
To seek a plausible explanation of why both Indian
and Pakistani textbooks treat Partition so cursorily, we can
look in three directions. The first is the direction leading
to considerations of a technical or pedagogical nature. One
can try to justify the extreme brevity of the mention of
Partition violence by recalling that Partition is merely one
of the hundreds of events that have to be coveredI in the

narrative of India's history from ancient times to
Independence between Classes VI and VIII, and again in
later classes. No event, howsoever momentous or influential,
counts for more than any other occurrence. In the endless
stream of facts that textbooks present to children, every
event is reduced to a mere mention. The case of Pakistani
textbooks is similar, despite the fact that the format of
'Pakistan Studies' offers a selective format for the discussion
of history. On account of its ideological character and poor
syllabus design, the conception of 'Pakistan Studies' has
failed to free the school historian from the compulsion to
cover everything in a superficial manner.
Until history as a school subject is conceptualized
differently, allowing for prioritization of events for in-
depth discussion, this technical ground for justifying a
perfunctory treatment of Partition has to be granted some
validity. Another reason of a similar kind relates to
assumptions about children's capacity to cope with the
knowledge of conflict and violence. The belief that children
should be protected from news or knowledge of conflict is
widespread. It is possible that school historians of both
India and Pakistan share this belief, and that it impels them
to confine the record of the violence associated with
Partition to a few words and numbers. The 'happy' aspect
of Partition-the fact that it gave Pakistan its birth-is so
overwhelming, the Pakistani school historian seems to
imply, that its juxtaposition with the tragic aspects of
Partition will make the discussion too confusing to be
comprehended by young readers.
A second direction leads to the recognition of the
ideological constraints or compulsions which impel both
the Indian and Pakistani historians to dispose of Partition
218 Rival Histories
as a topic with a brief mention. For somewhat different

reasons, both Indian and Pakistani historians could desire
to sanitize the narrative of the freedom struggle by avoiding
a detailed discussion of the traumatic incidents that marked
Panition. Indian school historians typically delineate this
final phase of the struggle as a time of vicious manipulation
by the British and Muslim communalists.
The mid-1940s get projected in nearly all school
textbooks used in India as a period when nationalism
suddenly lost both its sense of direction and energy which
it had apparently maintained since the 1920s. A cursory
mention of Partition riots helps to maintain the theory
that Panition was not an outcome of the socio-political
conditions which had been gathering momentum for a
considerable length of time, quite visibly in fact since the
1920s. It also helps to protect and enhance the celebratory
·character of the attainment of Independence. If Panition
were to be discussed elaborately enough to let the students
analyse the socio-political conditions leading to it, the
purpose of teaching history at school would have to be
defined quite differently. Any liberalization of the goals of
teaching history at school, so as to provide stimulus to the
student's intellectual development, would appear to endanger
the pantheon as well as the canon of the freedom struggle.
In the case of Pakistan, an elaborate discussion of
Panition could be seen as involving the serious risk of
arousing doubts about the validity of the idea of Pakistan
itself, particularly as a nation which was unjustly treated at
the time of its birth and which remains perpetually hostile
to India. The huge migration of people as a result of
Partition was necessitated by the specific nature of the
demand for Pakistan and by the geography that the carving
out of a new nation implied. Portrayal of the Panition-
related events at any length could well mean the possibility

of young students and their teachers feeling impelled to
probe the rationality of the two-nation theory which gave
birth to the idea of Pakistan. Even though such probing
would be addressed to a decision made long ago and to
leaders long dead, it would hardly be consistent with the
policy of using education to transmit an ideologically
tailored picture of the past and the present. Far easier and
consistent with this policy is to treat the token teaching of
history under 'Pakistan Studies' as an opportunity to
socialize the young into an inheritance of rancour.
A third direction for seeking an explanation for the
evasive portrayal of Partition in school history can be
traced by assessing history itself as a discourse. In an
attempt to do so, Gyanendra Pandey has claimed that
history, as presently conceptualized, is incapable of dealing
with violence and suffering. 18 The language available to the
historian, and the discourse in which historiography
functions, do not permit the experience of ordinary people,
who live through traumatic events like the Partition, to be
recognized, Pandey argues. This is why, he feels, recent
history-writing appears 'singularly uninterested' in exploring
the meaning of Partition for those who have lived through
it. Pandey's argument underscores the point made by post-
modernist critics of history who contend that in the name
of objectivity, history rides roughshod on the memories of
ordinary men and women. 19 Going along this line of
reasoning, we can say that history as a discipline is so
poorly equipped to deal with human suffering that school
textbooks of history are of necessity sketchy and dismissive
when they deal with a theme like Partition.
In Pandey's critique, history has been contrasted with
literature. One way to improve the writing and teaching of
220 Rival Histories
history implicit in critiques of this kind lies in incorporating

literary readings in the study of history. Mushirul Hasan's
plea for using literature to resurrect the 'many histories' of
Partition may be of great interest to those who wish to
reform the teaching of history in schools. 2° For one thing,
such an idea can embolden school practitioners to recognize
that pedagogical needs, such as better grasp of a historical
context, should take priority over the observance of the
conventional parameters of history as a discipline. The use
of literature as a resource for support material also has the
potential to show that politics and ideologies do not fully
account for human behaviour.
In the midst of the barbaric cruelty that the division of
India and Pakistan unleashed, there were people who
risked their own lives in order to help those whom they
might have been expected to harm if religious frenzy were
truly all pervasive. In memoirs of Partition and in other
genres of literature we find ample portraits of such ordinary
men and women. A history which focuses on the greats
alone fails to acknowledge such action.
The End?
For Indian children, not just the narrative of the freedom
struggle but history itself comes to an end in 1947. As a
separate subject at the senior secondary level as well as a
constituent of 'social studies' in the earlier classes, history
runs out of prescribed content after it has covered Partition
and some of the events associated with Independence. The
choice of these events usually includes the making of the
Constitution, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi,
integration of the princely states, and the beginning of
Five-Year Plans. None of these topics gets the attention it
Glory and Grief 1be Final Years 221
demands-not even the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.

By the time the history teacher reaches this last part of the
syllabus and textbook, a sense of haste fills the classroom.
The change of weather from mid-February onwards signifies
examination-time in the calendar of Indian children and
their school. What little time was available earlier for
probing and discussion suddenly evaporates. In any case, as
far as the teaching of history is concerned, there is nowhere
to go, for the officially designed syllabus of history has left
the last half of the twentieth century-i.e. the entire history
of independent India-as a period outside history. What all
has happened in this long patch may filter through in
civics classes, cinema and television; history as formally
constituted knowledge does not cover it. From that
perspective, Partition is the last major event to have occurred
in India's long history, and as such it maintains an evocative
freshness-both as an item signifying the end of the freedom
struggle and as a factor of children's socialization into a
political legacy. One can reasonably argue that its symbolic
value would change or diminish if India's school history
went beyond it.
Partition signifies birth or a new beginning in the
narrative of freedom designed for Pakistan's children. It
marks no discontinuity, and the narrative smoothly moves
on. Unlike the Indian syllabi of .history, Pakistani syllabi
and textbooks are designed to cover the post-Independence
period in detail. Of course, they have every reason to do
so, some people might cynically say, for this period
constitutes the only real history Pakistan can officially call
its own . .Given the frames of perception we discussed early
on in this book, it is hardly surprising that India figures
quite often in the post-Independence history of Pakistan.
Kashmir is frequently mentioned, and the wars fought
222 Rival Histories
with India are discussed in detail. Textbooks interchange

the word 'Bharat' with 'India' in a seemingly unpatterned
manner, but if one looks carefully, the former gets
preference in contexts that are explicitly hostile. In
Pakistan's official perception, which is represented by
state-owned television, radio, and state textbooks, India or
Hindustan was divided in 1947 into Pakistan and Bharat.
The term 'India' continues to be used in English, but the
textbooks written in Urdu insist on using Bharat, indicating
the importance of naming.
PART III
Future Prospects
11
Children Write About Partition
While I was writing this book, I had the opportunity to

interact with children in two schools: one in Delhi and
another in Lahore. These opportunities to talk directly to
children were, of course, highly stimulating and precious,
but they also made me aware of the disadvantage that a
dialogue with children necessarily has as a means of getting
to know their views and perspective. It is not easy to
refrain from assuming a teacher-like role in a discussion
with children. One unknowingly interrupts the flow of the
discussion, especially if several children want to talk at the
same time. By making these interruptions, one inadvertently
shapes the dialogue. These pitfalls notwithstanding, the
discussions gave me valuable insights into how children
perceive history and use it to make sense of the present.
With the intention to pursue these insights further, I
decided to collect short, freehand essays written by children
226 Future Prospects
in both countries on the topic, 'The division of India and

Pakistan.' The teachers who helped me collect these essays
were asked to stand by and desist from making any
contribution during the thirty-five minutes that the children
took to express themselves in any language of their choice.
I ended up with sixty essays written in English and
fifty-three in Hindi by children from Class IX and XI
belonging to three schools of Delhi; one, an elite public
.,
school, the second, an ordinary public school, and the
third, a government school. From Lahore, I was able to
obtain thirty-two essays, twenty of them written by children
studying at an elite school, and twelve by children from a
private Urdu-medium school. What follows is my analysis
of these 145 essays. I hardly need to say that this analysis
makes no claim either to objectivity or to generalizability.
Nor does it constitute an attempt to asse:.s the impact of
the teaching of history at school, though there are obvious
points of continuity between textbooks and children's
essays. My purpose is simply to share with readers an
analysis of the approaches children in India and Pakistan
adopt for looking at problems arising out of their history
and relationship.
Wide Range
To begin with, I found a remarkable range of views and
attitudes reflected in the essays written by each group of
children in the two countries. There are specific patterns of
response too, distinguishable according to the type of
schools children are attending, but within each school one
finds a startlingly wide range of views. The range is
startling because we know that the system of education in
both India and Pakistan discourages independent expression
Children Write About Partition 227
of one's views. In fact, independent thinking is stifled

early, and stock expression is encouraged. In addition to
this established fact, we know how narrow the range of
views represented in the media of both India and Pakistan
is on matters relating to their past and present-day
relationship. As an Indian I wish I could say that the
Indian media is categorically superior in this regard, but I
cannot. There are exceptional voices in the media on both
sides, but these are exceptions. Considering the
overwhelming presence of the media in the lives of children
in both countries, the range in their views came as a
pleasant surprise.
Let me elaborate on the nature of the range before
trying to explain it. Among the essays written by Indian
children one can identify the following two extremes
within which most other arguments fit. On the one extreme
we find children who feel that the Partition was forced
upon us by the British. These children feel that the
consequences of Partition have been terrible, but we must
now learn to live in peace. On the other extreme are the
children who think that India was divided because of
pressure from Muslims; that the division was allowed to
take place without ensuring that all Muslims went to
Pakistan. Children who hold this view apparently accept
the Partition as final but do not accept the pluralist and
secular character of Indian society. They feel that if Muslims
chose to have their own country, the rest of India ought to
be a country of Hindus alone. Children who represent the
first extreme, on the other hand, feel that India was divided
mainly because the British wanted to do so, in continuation
of their 'divide and rule' policy. These children find the
ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan quite
unnecessary and harmful. Even though they do not agree
with the creation of Pakistan, they are anxious to establish

peaceful relations with it.
The perceptions of the rest of the Indian children who
wrote essays for me can be arranged between these two
extremes, though not in a uniformly distributed manner. It
is clear from the two extremes described above that all the
Indian children who wrote these essays resent the division
of India. It is in the context of this consensus that we
notice the range of stances taken. The stand that India was
divided at the behest of the British who had weakened
India much earlier by encouraging divisive tendencies is
quite consistent with the overall view taken in many of the
textbooks analysed in this study, and also with the
Constitutional policy of giving an equal status to all citizens,
irrespective of their religion or faith. This latter consistency
is a general one, in the sense that quite a few criticisms of
the state policy can be accommodated within it. These
criticisms may be directed towards issues as different as the
handling of Kashmir or the removal of poverty. Similarly,
the general view of Partition as a British strategy
accommodates differences on detail. Children who hold
the British responsible for Partition perceive Jinnah as a
British instrument while others mention a tussle over
prime ministership as the main reason why the British had
to divide India. These different views are put forward in
the context of a common argument which supports India's
multi-religious ethos. The majority of essays written in all
three types of Indian schools echo this argument at one
level or another.
Children who disagree with the general argument that
the British were primarily responsible for Partition, also
present an interesting, though smaller range of their own.
Among such children, the extreme position is held by the
ones who categorically want India to be a Hindu nation

because Pakistan is a Muslim one. Even these children
criticize the Partition and call it evil, but their ire is focused
on Muslims. Children who take this position are very few
in all three schools.
The ones studying in the upmarket public school
express themselves in sober words; those studying in the
ordinary public school apply rather harsh, sometimes
abusive language. Among the government school-children
who favour a Hindu India, there are some who believe that
before 1947 India was ruled by Pakistan. This belief would
seem totally at odds with the history syllabus and textbooks
if it did not accompany the contention that Pakistan ruled
over India with the help of the British. Apparently, these
children are using the term 'Pakistan' as a synonym for
Muslims-a practice not confined to just these few children.
As a word, 'Pakistan' has become a synonym for divisiveness
in Hindi, and is quite often used to connote a tendency to
cause division-allegedly a special quality of Muslims. Thus,
'Pakistan' becomes a stereotype of Muslims, of their history
and nature. The idea of a Hindu India is inevitably linked
with a stereotype of Muslims which is based on hatred and
distrust. In one essay by a child from the ordinary public
school, the expression of dislike for Muslims goes so far as
to transform Partition into a benign event-,-one by which
India got cleansed. This is the only essay out of the 113
written by Indian children in which the division of India
and Pakistan is not directly condemned.
Pensive Mood
The essays by Pakistani children revolve around the question
of whether Partition was worthwhile or not. Their
interpretation of the topic seems to be more introspective

than the one we see in the Indian essays. It would be hasty
to see this as evidence of Pakistan's much-discussed crisis of
identity. Going by these few essays I can say that Pakistani
youngsters have no problem identifying themselves with
their country, in much the same way as the Indian children
who show no sign of an identity problem. The pensive
mood most of the English-medium Pakistani school-children
and one or two of the Urdu-medium school-children display
in their essays is indicative of a wider concern. It is born
out of the recognition that India was divided at the behest
of the Muslim community and its great leaders, Jinnah and
Iqbal. The young writers of these essays accept the
ownership of that legacy, but their acceptance does not
stop them from wondering whether Partition was a good
idea after all. The answers range from a definite 'yes' to a
prevaricating 'may be, may be not'. Rather more children
take the first position; those who take a hesitant stance are
mostly from an English-medium school.
Children from the Urdu-medium school include in
their essays a far greater number of historical details, which
may be a reflection of the style favoured in their school. In
India too, the opportunity to write expressively and go
beyond factual details is associated with English-medium
schools, although not all such schools are able to provide
a chance for reflective writing in · the course of their
curricular routine. Studies of Pakistani education and society
suggest that the division between English-medium schools
and the others is wider there than it is in India, at least at
present. 1 The essays written by Pakistani children bear this
out. All these essays reflect a studied stance. Unlike their
English-medium counterparts, who flaunt their
psychological distance from history, the Urdu-medium
children stuff their essays with historical detail, leaving

little room for commentary or spontaneous reflection. The
beautiful handwriting of these children also suggests an
emphasis in their training on skill and norms rather than
individual expression. I am not saying that good handwriting
need not be a priority at school. My point is that the
contrast between the essays of English-medium and Urdu-
medium school-children is further highlighted by the
uniformly attractive handwriting of the latter. Many of the
English-medium school-children have a messy handwriting,
but they express themselves rather more freely than any of
the Urdu-medium school-children do.
The children who uphold the Partition as a good
decision apply the same arguments that we find in most
Pakistani school textbooks. These contentions are the same
that were originally used from the late 1930s onwards by
the leaders of the Pakistan Movement. The first among
these refers to the religious differences between Muslims
and Hindus. Then comes the argument about the Muslims
not getting the same opportunities in British India that the
Hindus got. Interestingly, and quite understandably, the
specific reference to educational and employment
opportunities is made mostly by the Urdu-medium school-
children. Apparently, Pakistan's ongoing economic crisis
and its sharply divided social structure make the Urdu-
medium schoolchild acutely anxious abo.ut employment.
Other children make a general point about discriminatory
practices. All the essays say that Partition helped to end the
discrimination suffered by Muslims and allowed them to
become first-class citizens. One of the essays ends with a
reference to Kosovo, saying that Partition averted a Kosovo-
like situation in India.
At the other end we find the view that the culture of
Hindus and Muslims was and is really the same. The

children who use this argument acknowledge a sense of
confusion regarding the basis of Partition, but they perceive
no problem in accepting it as a historical fact. Some of
them mention what they have heard from their grandparents
about the harmony and neighbourly relations that prevailed
between the Hindus and Muslims before Partition. This
knowledge is held in balance with the general awareness,
apparently acquired at school, that Hindus wanted to
dominate the Muslims and that the British favoured the
Hindus. If Hindus and Muslims could live peacefully
together in the past, why can't they do so now as separate
nations, these children ask. Their argument incorporates
the challenges of economic development that both countries
face. The nuclear bombs tested by both the countries and
their missile programmes are criticized. In this matter, the
extent of disagreement with state policy that a few Pakistani
children convey is greater than what we find m any
segment of the Indian children.
The critical stand of these few dissenters among
Pakistani children-mostly of the English-medium school,
but a couple from the Urdu-medium school as well-has
another dimension which appears quite unusual if we see it
from an Indian perspective. They judge the Partition and
the achievements of Pakistan on grounds of civic morality
in a philosophical tone quite unexpected in children's
writing, and certainly altogether absent in the Indian essays.
One of the children writes: 'Why did Quaid-e-Azam make
Pakistan? So we can be proud of it and show that there is
no other world like Pakistan in the map. But now everyone
is only thinking of himself.' The essay goes on to connect
littering the streets and casual violence with the decline of
the idea of Pakistan. An Urdu-medium schoolchild questions
the authenticity of Pakistan's freedom and writes: 'We are

still ruled by the English. We use what they manufacture.
Even our government is ruled by them. Anyone born in
Pakistan is a debtor.' Both these essays convey a sense of
decline and loss, using the original idea of Pakistan as a
yardstick.
The only comparable feature in the Indian essays is the
inscription one finds at the end of some of the essays
written by the government school-children: 'Mera Bharat
Mahaan' (My India is Great). It is significant that one does
not find this inscription in any of the essays written by
children of the two public schools. Though one c.1:nnot
make a blanket generalization, it is true that over the last
two decades or so the school system has developed a sharp
division between the middle class, which lives on a stable
income, and the working classes. It is mostly the latter
whose children attend government schools, in many cases
almost exclusively so. The uncertainties of their lives,
combined with the poor condition of the school and
indifferent teaching, make these children unexpressive and
restless, often seeking solace in a slogan or a bland
pronouncement. It is not inexplicable then, though it
might surprise us, that some of them should fail to record
the correct year of India's Indepen~ence. The day and
month are recorded correctly, but the year is given as
either 1942 or 1945. As I have mentioned earlier, a few of
these children say that India was und~r Pakistani rule
before Independence. Even though we can make sense of
this error by reminding ourselves that 'Pakistan' stands for
'Muslim' in a derisive discourse not uncommon in the
culture of schools (I have encountered this discourse in
elite as well as in ordinary schools), the error has worrisome
implications. It is rooted in an impression of history that
traces the loss of-India's freedom to the early Middle Ages.

Firmly anti-Islam, this view of India's past denigrates the
freedom struggle and the vision of some of its famous
leaders, particularly Gandhi. Children who see India's last
millennium in terms of foreign rule and slavery-first of
Islam, then of the British-are perhaps influenced by
revivalist propaganda and the media, but we cannot discount
the possible effect of the state's own discourse which
represents border clashes with Pakistan as a threat to
India's 'freedom'.
If we leave aside this small group of essays, we do not
find as long a shadow of historical awareness in the essays
written by Indian children as we do in those by Pakistani
children. They refer to 1857 as a critical point when the
British terminated Muslim rule, and started favouring the
Hindus. This is how the Pakistani children perceive what
the Indian children call 'divide and rule'. Apart from the
wrongs done by the British and the Hindus, they also refer
to the horrors of Partition as the price paid by Muslims for
getting their homeland. The frenzy of Partition figures in
some of the Indian essays too, but the violence associated
with terrorism in Kashmir has a far greater presence. If we
were to calculate the frequency of proper nouns, Kashmir
would #gure as the third most often mentioned name in
the Indi'lm essays, the first two being Gandhi and Jinnah.
Another frequently mentioned point concerns cricket.
Interestingly, not one of the 113 Indian essays makes the
allegation basic to the Sangh discourse on Muslims that
they always favour the Pakistani cricket team. Far from
echoing this kind of charge in any manner, the children
who mention cricket decry the tendency to convert matches
into battles and the practice of playing solely for the sake
of winning. One of the essays mentions the fate of Indian
hockey as a proof that Partition was a big loss. Had India

and Pakistan stayed together, their combined hockey team
would have been invincible, this child says.
If we pool together all the essays written by children of
both the countries, we would find a sense of tiredness as an
overarching theme, forming a kind of bridge, between the
children of the two countries. This feeling finds expression
in different idioms, but the sources are remarkably similar.
One source is the wastefulness of war; the other is Kashmir.
A number of children on both sides say that they were not
around when Partition took place, and they seldom think
about it; but they see no reason why the tension that
started with Partition should continue. Quite a few of
them cite politicians as the source oi the tension and
conflict. They refer to the bigger world, moving ahead of
both India and Pakistan in terms of prosperity, technology,
sports and everything else. 'Why can't we forget our
differences and move forward?' they ask. True, these
sentiments sound treacly except for the anguish that recurs,
sometimes taking the form of anger, and at other times of
grief. An essay by an Urdu-medium Pakistani child sees it
as God's wish, saying that nothing will happen without
His desire.
Children on both sides recognize Kashmir as the main
reason for the conflict between India and Pakistan, but
none of them gives evidence of more. than a nominal
awareness of the nature of the problem. I had expected to
see in the children's writing a reflection of the usual
political rhetoric over Kashmir that politicians and officers
use both in India and Pakistan; instead, I found a sense of
disenchantment. It is hard to say what .lies at the heart of
this disillusionment. It may well be part of the more
general phenomenon one sees among the educated.
Indifference to political issues has grown over the recent

years, in response to an ever-increasing body of public
belief, if not hard evidence, that politicians are not bothered
about people's welfare. On the other hand, the
disenchantment over Kashmir may simply be a variant of
the instinct that the problem is insoluble.
The essays which mention Kashmir with great anguish
are the ones written, among the Indian children, by those
who see India as a Hindu nation, and among Pakistani
children, by the ones who agree with this view of India.
These children represent a distinct hardline position. My
own experience as a university teacher suggests that over
the recent years this position has gained popularity. One
gets the impression from the English-language press in
Pakistan that a similar process has been underway there.
The essays at my disposal do not seem consistent with this
impression about either country. One might venture the
guess that it is during the college years that the young in
both countries harden their attitudes towards the other.
In general, the politicization of college and university
campuses has indeed taken a rightward turn in India since
the early mid-1980s, and in Pakistan, the strides made by
organizations like Jamaat-e-Islami in student politics are
well recognized. 2 School education has also been a focus of
the Islamization policies since the mid-1970s, but the
effectiveness of curricular initiatives in this regard is hardly
comparable to the impact that direct politicization of
youth during the college years makes in a wider national
ethos dominated by fundamentalist rhetoric. In the Indian
case, the school curriculum has, by and large, remained
insulated from changes and pressures felt from the mid-
1980s onwards in the political and cultural environment.
Curricular policies may have been unimpressive in the
wider context of the modernization of education, but they

have permitted an instinctive kind of preference for secular
ideals to survive despite the growing presence of communal
persuasion.
Finally, there remains the question why we find such
an impressive range of views among both groups of essays,
and not the uniform, stock responses that Indian and
Pakistani systems of education train children to articulate.
The answer lies in the nature of the topic. The opportunity
to express oneself on the subject of the Inda-Pak division
excites the young, apparently because it has deep
associations. It is hardly a matter of surprise that they do
not get such an opportunity as part of the usual school
assignments. As a topic of study, Pakistan is taboo in
Indian schools, and the same applies to India in Pakistan.
The syllabus and textbooks of history used in Indian
schools stop at 1947. That is the last time Indian children
hear about Pakistan at school. And in Pakistan, though the
syllabus provides for the study of post-Independence history,
India figures only in the context of the Inda-Pak wars,
which means that the last mention of India occurs in the
context of 1971. Given these strange facts of curricular
policy, Indian and Pakistani children do not hear about
each others' country as part of their formal learning. Yet,
their everyday reality is steeped in the consciousness of the
'other'. To use Bernstein's concept of 'frame', we can say
that school education forcefully frames out .any knowledge
of the 'other' for both Indian and Pakistani children. 3
Ironically, it is for this reason that the typical way in
which children are trained to write on topics given at
school did not figure at all in the essays I collected from
them on the division of India and Pakistan. They wrote
whatever they thought about it, giving us a wide variety of
views.
The diversity we find in these essays is also a reflection

of the complexity of education as a socializing process.
Although education often proves vulnerable to the
propaganda of dominant ideologies, it also has the potential
to serve as a site of resistance. This potential is dependent
on the extent to which socialization at school stays aloof
from, or even contradicts in certain matters, the primary
socialization that takes place at home. 4 As we have noticed,
the points of view represented in the two sets of essays do
not all fit the popular frames of Indo-Pak perceptions
discussed in Chapter 3. Apparently, despite all kinds of
systemic constraints and the influence of the socio-political
ethos, schools do serve as places where thoughtful
articulation seems a relevant thing to do. What ought to
worry both India and Pakistan as nationally constituted
societies is the relative paucity of such thoughtful articulation
in schools where the majority of children study. I am
referring to the divide one sees between English-medium
private schools and the Hindi- or Urdu-medium schools
run by the government. The widening of this divide over
the recent decades jeopardizes the aim and rationale of
universal education.
12
History and Peace
During a discussion on this study at a workshop of

history teachers of Central schools from all over India, I
was asked: 'Why should history be taught from a perspective
of peace? Why shouldn't it reflect the reality?' The question
had arisen from the argument that the manner in which
the freedom struggle is presented to children helps sustain
the hostility one sees between India and Pakistan. The
larger argument was that the paucity of communication
noticeable between the two countries is .at least partly
related to the rival perceptions of the past that schools
promote among the young. In particular, the events leading
to the Partition are represented in school texts used in the
two countries in ways that do not encourage children to
look at the past as past. Rather, the past becomes a
resource for keeping misgivings and enmity alive. Instead
of imparting respect for the past and a sense of curiosity
about it, the teaching of history fosters a perpetual quarrel

with the past in both countries. In India, the narrative of
freedom is structured around the tension between 'secular'
and 'communal' forces. Since the tension is directly relevant
to defining India's national identity and its distinctiveness
with regard to Pakistan, an account of the nationalist
movement structured around this tension necessarily
encourages a disapproving and suspicious view of Pakistan.
On the other hand, school textbooks used in Pakistan
present the political narrative of freedom in a cultural
wrapping designed specifically to buttress the claim that
the urge to create Pakistan arose out of certain irreconcilable
differences between Hindus and Muslims.
It seemed an awkward question at the time, but I now
find in it an appropriate concluding thought for this book.
The teacher who asked the question apparently regards
history as a settled matter, something that deals with facts
which cannot be disputed. The conceptual ground on
which this common perception of history is based is that
the past is past-it cannot be changed. This view of the past
carries the stamp of everyday wisdom which suggests that,
compared to the present and the future, the past is fully
'known' to us. Indeed, this perception extends to regarding
the past itself as a source of wisdom-similar to the sagacity
that comes with personal experience. Someone who
disregards the past or does not show the willingness to
learn from it is considered to be immature or irresponsible.
Most of the time, the argument is made in reverse; that is,
when someone meets an unpleasant situation, people remind
him that he would have done better if he had cared to keep
the past in mind. This kind of common sense is apparently
based on a romantic view of memory as a reliable record
of experience. Since memory is intertwined with the notion
History and Peace 241
of one's own self, and has a powerful role in giving an

identity to individuals as well as to collectivities, it seeks
validity entirely from itself in preference to external sources
like the memory of others and documentary evidence.' For
that reason, memory of the past is not about reality; rather
it represents a reconstruction of past reality in ways that
nourish the self.
This is not to deny the role that memory can play in
enhancing our understanding of history. Recollection as a
means of reconstructing the past has enabled recent
historiography to step into several erstwhile neglected areas
of study. Subaltern and women's history, and the study of
traumatic events like the Holocaust are examples of this
development. Urvashi Butalia's book, 1be Other Side of
Silence, is a stunning instance of the potential that individual
memories offer us for constructing a holistic view of
extraordinary political happenings, such as the Partition. 2
However, a serious problem arises if memory and history
are regarded as one and if the everyday wisdom I have
discussed above in the context of memory is directly
applied to history. As Bentley says, 'history is precisely
non-memory, a systematic discipline which seeks to rely
on mechanisms and controls quite different from those
which memory triggers and often intended to give memory
the lie.' 3 The teacher who asked the question about history
and peace was using her memory-which perhaps millions
of others share-of Indo-Pak relations as evidence of her
knowledge of 'reality'. Unless we challenge this memory-
based view of history, we cannot hope to save history as a
school subject from getting trivialized. Memory may be a
useful resource, among others, to widen the scope of
history teaching, but the idea that historical happenings
can be explored and interpreted objectively must receive
priority.
There may be limits to objectivity in the social sciences,

but it is a value without which it is very difficult to define
learning. As it is, the social sciences have a weak status iJ)
the school curriculum. The expectation that the teaching
of history would benefit from its incorporation in 'social
studies' has remained unfulfilled in both India and Pakistan.
The new subject was supposed to build bridges between
history, geography, civics and economics. What it did,
instead, was to burden students and teachers with the
compartmentalized syllabi of its different components
masked under a single label. The crowding of facts and
information resulting from this kind of mechanical
organization of social studies precipitated the dilution of
the roles that its discrete components might serve in
children's intellectual development.
In Pakistan, 'social studies' was further diluted and
distorted by the introduction of 'Pakistan Studies' (as
explained in Chapter IV). In India, the teaching of social
sciences at school has come under assault from conservative
critics who want a Hindu-revivalist line to replace the
pluralistic vision of society reflected so far in curriculum
policy and textbooks. These elements have used the familiar
cover of 'value orientation' for twisting the content of
syllabi and textbooks in favour of a narrow, religio-cultural
representation of Indian society and its past. In the context
of pedagogy, as Sarangapani has explained, this ascendant
conservative approach is as deeply indifferent to children
and their ways of constructing knowledge as the earlier
approach was, if not more so. 4
Truncated Debate
The public debate on school history has remained
exclusively focused on its potential as a means• of political
socialization. Though the debate has served as a platform

to articulate larger issues which have political and cultural
significance, it has also contributed to the neglect of history
as a school subject, particularly in terms of the pedagogical
and examination practices associated with the teaching of
history. It has encouraged text writers and teachers to
overlook the pedagogic problems that arise out of the
traditional role of writers of history texts as magicians who
show students what all happened in the past but do not
reveal the basis of their knowledge.
In India, the debate on history textbooks has been
focused on the distinction between secular and communal
perspectives, and in Pakistan, on the meaning of the
'Pakistan ideology'. In neither country has the debate ever
extended to questioning the quality of history teaching in
schools. New Indian textbooks indicate that the writing of
history-and consequently its teaching-may now become
even more indifferent to children's learning by absorbing
the influence of the quiz culture associated with television.
The earlier trend of concentrating on 'facts' and ignoring
evidence and argument takes a grimmer, extreme form in
some of the recent textbooks · published by provincial
bodies. They follow the quiz approach which encourages
children to regard the verbalization of the 'right' answer as
the only competence that matters. The new 'national
curriculum framework' gives us reason to suspect that the
next generation of NCERT textbooks may also reflect this
trivialization of history-that this may be the route that
the politics of history now takes in order to let ideological
indoctrination become the purpose of discussing the past. 5
In Pakistan, the textbooks used in state-run schools have
been of this kind for well over a generation, and there is
no sign yet to suggest that a serious rethinking is underway.
Instead of Waiting
There is little reason to expect that the state policy in
either India or Pakistan will remedy this situation in the
foreseeable future. The zest for educational reform has
never been high in either country; it is currently in a
particularly low phase. In place of progressive reform, we
are confronted in India with the prospect of retrograde
measures like 'value education' -a device to mask the move
to establish a wider scope for the inclusion cf religious and
mythological content. 6 In Pakistan, the 1998 policy, with
its thrust on the transmission of ideology, has little chance
of being challenged or reversed in the immediate future.7 In
both countries, the atmosphere of political uncertainty is
also likely to encourage the use of educational policy as a
battleground for ideological debates. Aims and objectives
will be hotly contested in these debates, while real schools,
textbooks and teachers' training programmes remain starved
of attention. We can hardly imagine that the potential uses
of history for promoting a sense of wonder and curiosity
about the past and respect for it will receive official
attention in either India or Pakistan, even if the two
governments agree to engage in some sort of dialogue for
achieving military peace.
Innovative enterprise, however, need not wait for
systemic reform. A handful of schools in India and Pakistan
can come together to design and offer a shared course of
study of the modern period, including the freedom struggle.
To begin with, such a course should provide for sufficient
time to explore selected events in detail, training the
students to assemble a scenario from a chosen vantage
point. An exchange of students between participating schools
could ensure that the process of scenario-building attempts
to accommodate the rival national perspectives. Similarly,

an exchange of project reports prepared by Indian and
Pakistani students would allow them to make sense of
divergent perspectives. Use of biography, literature, and
journalism to expand the scope of interpretation given in
existing historical narratives must form a strong feature of
this project. One of the objectives would be to encourage
young students to probe controversies among historians by
looking at the evidence cited or ignored by them. The
controversy surrounding the 1857 revolt and the contested
implications of the Nehru Report can serve as useful topics
in this regard.
Application of analytical techniques and judgement is
now a part of the curriculum for secondary classes in
countries where a serious effort to reform the teaching of
history has been made over the recent years. 8 In Germany,
for instance, secondary-level students are required to probe
the Holocaust by analysing political, economic and cultural
factors with the help of relevant material, including primary
sources. In England, recent reforms in curricular practices
have opened up the teaching of history to multiple forms
of student inquiry, such as argument-building, appreciating
ambiguity, and weighing rival judgements. Such ideas may
look fanciful to us, given the poor state of history teaching
we are used to in our schools, but the potential they have
for enlivening the study of Indo-Pak history can hardly be
denied.
Apart from bringing together teachers and students of
the two countries, the project envisaged here might create
an opportunity for professional historians of India and
Pakistan to examine school textbooks in joint sessions. If
that happens, it will inaugurate the lifting of what is
arguably one of the thickest iron curtains in the present-
day world, so far as the flow of ideas and scholarship is
concerned. Popular music and cinema have served as a

tunnel under this curtain, but pleasant tunes and faces
cannot by themselves establish the basis for a peaceful and
mature relationship. Education has a vital role to play in
helping India and Pakistan overcome the chronically
unsettling effects of their interlocked frames of perception
discussed in the first part of this book. The teaching of no
other school subject has the same importance in this
context as the teaching of history. Inculcating a respect for
the past and the curiosity to make sense of it is a major
educational challenge for societies where denial of the past
and the urge to change it have enjoyed popular validity.
List of Textbooks
India
1. Modern India (VIII) by Arjun Dev and Indira Arjun Dev
(New Delhi: NCERT, 1989).
2. Modern India (XII) by Bipan Chandra (New Delhi: NCERT,
1990; rep. 1998).
3. A Textbook ofHistory and Civics (X) by Perin Bagli (Mumbai:
General Printers, 2000).
4. Social Studies (VIII) by J.P. Shukla, V. Brahmbhatt, C.K.
Patel, Y.P. Pathak (Gandhinagar: Gujarat State Board of
School Textbooks, 1991; rep. 1999).
5. Social Science (X) by T.R. Radhakrishnan, I.I. Gnanajothi,
G. Shantha {Chennai: Tamil Nadu Textbook Corporation,
1997; revised, 2000).
6. History (XII) by T.R. Radhakrishnan, T. Veerappan (Chennai:
Tamil Nadu Textbook Corporation, 1996).
7. Samajik Shiksha (Part 2) (X) by Sulakkhan Singh 'Meet' (Ajit
Singh Nagar: Punjab School Education Board, 2000).
248 List of Textbooks
8. Hamara Itihas aur Nagrik Jeevan (VIII) by Sachchidanand

Dhaulakhandi, et al (Lucknow: Basic Shiksha Parishad, Uttar
Pradesh, 1999).
9. Samajik Vigyan (X) by Jainarayan Shukla, et al (Allahabad:
Madhyamik Shiksha Parishad, Uttar Pradesh, 1999).
10. History of India (IX and X) by Somendralal Roy (Calcutta:
Calcutta Book House, 1990; rep. 1997).
Quotations from textbooks Nos. 7, 8 and 9 in this list have been

translated by the author.
Pakistan
1. Social Studies (VIII) by I. Shamim and H.F. Ahmed (Lahore:
Punjab Textbook Board, 1994).
2. Pakistan Studies (IX-X) by H.A. Rizvi, et al (Lahore: Punjab
Textbook Board, 1998).
3. Introduction to Pakistan Studies by M.I. Rabbani and M.A.
Sayyid (Lahore: Caravan Book House, 1999, rev.).
4. An Introduction to Pakistan Studies by G.S. Sarwar (Karachi:
Qamar Kitab Ghar, 1998).
5. Social Studies (VIII) by M. Arshad (Karachi: Scientific
Publication, undated).
6. A Concise History ofInda-Pakistan by S.F. Mahmud (Karachi:
Oxford University P,ress, 1997).
7. Pakistan-A Historic and Contemporary Look (Pakistan Studies:
History Component} by Farooq Bajwa (Karachi: Oxford
University Press, 1999).
8. An Illustrated History of Pakistan (Book 3) by J. Hussain
(Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1997). ·
Notes
1. Introduction
1: Krishna Kumar, Learning/ram Conflict (New Delhi: Orient

Longman, 1996).
2. Avril Powell, 'Perceptions of the South Asian Past: Ideology,
Nationalism, and School History Textbooks,' in Nigel Crook
(ed.), 1he Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia (Delhi:
OUP, 1996), pp. 190-228; Navnita Chadha Behera,
'Perpetuating the Divide: Political Abuses of History in
South Asia,' Himal Oune 1996), pp. 40-43.
3. See Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (30: 2, April-June,
1998), especially the essay by L. Hein and, M. Selden,
'Learning Citizenship from the Past: Textbook Nationalism,
Global Context and Social Change,' pp. 3-15.
4. James Moffett, Teaching the Universe of Discourse (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1968).
5. The idea of an implied reader is derived from response
theory. Though developed mainly in the context of literary
reading, the theory is applicable to other kinds of texts
250 Notes
written for a designated audience, such as school-going

children. For an introduction to response theory, see
Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore: The John
Hopkins University Press, 1974) and The Act of Reading
(Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1978). For
an overview of reader-response theory, see Elizabeth Freund,
The Return of the Reader (New York: Methuen, 1987).
2. Children and the Past

l. For a selection of Emile Durkheim's writings, see Kenneth
Thompson (ed.), Readings from Emile Durkheim (London:
Routledge, 1989), esp.!cially Reading 12 on 'Moral Education'.
2. See Sudhir Kakar, The Colours of Violence (Delhi: Penguin,
1995); for a historical discussion, see B. Chattopadhayaya,
Representing the Other? (New Delhi: Manohar, 1998).
3. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social
Construction of Reality (New York: Doubleday, 1966).
4. See 'Nations and their Past: The Uses and Abuses of History'
in The Economist (21 December 1996), pp. 73-76.
5. See John Dewey's essay, 'The Aim of History in Elementary
Education' in The School and Society (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1900).
6. For a comprehensive introduction to Piaget's writings, see
Hans G. Furth, Piaget and Knowledge (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1969). For a recent commentary, which
updates the reader on the wide-ranging debates that Piaget's
work has triggered, see Peter E. Bryant's essay on Piaget in
., Roy Fuller (ed.), Seven Pioneers in Psychology (London:
Routledge, 1995).
7. For a lucid expl.mation, see David Elkind, Child Development
and Education (New York: OUP, 1976).
8. See Hilary Cooper, The Teaching 4 History (London: David
Fulton, 1992); Donald Thomson, 'Some Psychological Aspects
Notes 251
of History Teaching,' in W.H. Burston and C.W. Green

{eds.), Handbook of History Teachers (London: Methuen,
1972).
9. For a discussion of historical understanding, see The Aims of
School History (London: Institute of Education, 1992). For a
discussion of evidence in history, see Richard J. Evans, In
Defence of History (London: Granta, 1997).
10. Peter Knight has discussed the problems of applying the
concept of empathy in the teaching of history, in 'Empathy:
Concept, Confusion and Consequences in a National
Curriculum,' Oxford Review of Education {15: 1, 1989), pp.
41-53.
3. Frames of Popular Perception

1. NADRA stands for National Database and Registration
Authority.
2. K.M. Munshi, Somnath, The Shrine Eternal (Bombay:
Bharatiya Vidya Bhawan, 1952).
3. Satish Saberwal, India: The Roots of the Crisis {Delhi: Oxford,
1968), p. 75.
4. Sudhir Kakar, Shamans, Mystics, and Doctors (Delhi: OUP,
1982).
5. See Rustom Bharucha's analysis of Roja in 'On the Border
of Fascism,' Economic and Political Weekly (4 June 1994), pp.
1389-1395. For an extended discussion of film language, see
M.S.S. Pandian, The Image Trap (New Delhi: Sage, 1992).
6. Mumtaz Shah Nawaz, The Heart Divided {First published,
1957; Lahore: ASR, 1990).
7. Lahore has a special place in the intellectual and cultural life
of Pakistan, a distinction which it derives from its history-
as a centre of higher education and cultural activity during
the heyday of the British empire. Pran Neville's popular
252 Notes
memoir, Lahore (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 1997), celebrates

this history of Lahore.
8. Out of the vast body of scholarly writing that exists on
Pakistan's history, politics and economy, I would especially
like to mention Lawrence Ziring, Pakistan in the Twentieth
Century (Karachi: Oxford, 1997), and Craig Baxter and
Charles Kennedy (eds.), Pakistan 1997 (Boulder: Westview,
1998). For a succinct overview, see 'Pakistan' in The Oxford
Encyclopedia of the Modem Islamic World (New York: Oxford,
1995), pp. 286-297. Ayesha Jalal's comparative insight in
Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia (Lahore: Sange-
e-Meel, 1995) is also useful. A considerable amount of
harshly self-critical writing has been published in Pakistan
over the recent years. Two books of this kind are lkram
Azam's From Pakistan to Pak,istan (Lahore: National Book
Foundation, 1992) and Roedad Khan, Pakistan-a Dream
Gone Sour (Karachi: Oxford, 1998).
9. See Aijaz Ahmed, Lineage of the Present (New Delhi: Tulika,
1996).
10. Roedad Khan, op. cit., and Sara Suleri, Meatless Days (London:
Flamingo, 1991) are among the numerous books conveying
this depressive mood. Interviews with two of Pakistan's
leading liberal intellectuals, Eqbal Ahmad (Himal; March,
1999) and Hamza Alavi (The Herald; August 2000), provide
valuable insights into this national mood.
11. Khaled Ahmed, 'The Function of Myth-making in Indo-Pak
Relations,' The Friday Times (10 September 1999).
12. See, for example, Aijaz Ahmed, Nationalism & Globalisation
(Occasional Paper, Series-4, Department of Sociology, Pune,
2000).
4. Ideology and Textbooks

1. Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1997).
Notes 253
2. See Krishna Kumar, 'Agricultural Modernisation and

Education,' Economic and Political Weekly (31:35-37, Special
Number, 1996, pp. 2367-2373), for a discussion of the socio-
political climate in which the Kothari Commission wrote its
report, and for an analysis of the Commission's treatment of
the Gandhian idea of Basic Education.
3. Conversation with Romila Thapar, by K. Roy and R.
Batabyal, Summerhill (4:2, December 1998), pp. 3-8.
4. LL Rudolph and S.H. Rudolph, 'Rethinking Secularism:
Genesis and Implications of the Textbook Controversy,
1977-79,' Pacific Affairs (56: 1, Spring 1983), pp. 15-37.
5. See Tanika Sarkar, 'Educating the Children of the Hindu
Rashtra: Notes on RSS Schools,' in P. Bidwai, H. Mukhia,
A. Vanaik (eds.). Religiosity and Communalism (New Delhi:
Manohar, 1996), pp. 237-249. For a study of the ethos of
RSS schools, see Gyaneshwar and Jyoti Chaturvedi, 'The
Construction of Saraswati: Formation and Transformation
of Saffron Identity in Contemporary Uttar Pradesh,' paper
presented at the seminar on 'Education and Society in India',
Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi, March 29-31,
2000.
6. See Seminar issue 'Revivalism and Identity' (400: November
1993).
7. For a historical survey of the question of identity, see Alan
Whaite, 'Political Cohesion in Pakistan: Jinnah and the
Ideological State,' Contemporary South Asia (7: 2, 1998), pp.
181-192. For the present-day scene, see Mumtaz Ahmad,
'Revivalism, Islamisation, Sectarianism and Violence in
Pakistan,' in C. Baxter and C. Kennedy (eds.), Pakistan 1997,
(op. cit.) pp. 101-122.
8. India Partitioned (Vol. I & II, New Delhi: Roli, 1997), and
India's Partition (Delhi: Oxford, 1993), all edited by Mushirul
Hasan, provide a comprehensive introduction to the literature
on Partition. Also see Seminar (420: August 1994).
254 Notes
9. National Education Policy, 1998-2010 (Islamabad: Ministry

of Education, 1998), p. 9.
10. I.H. Qureshi, From Mira) to Domes (Karachi: S.A. Qureshi,
1983), p. 225.
11. See Aijaz Ahmed, Nationalism and Globalisation, op. cit.
12. Mansoor A. Quraishi, Some Aspects of Muslim Education
(Lahore: Universal, 1983) offers a general introduction to
Islamic educational ideas and philosophers. For introduction
to Islam, see S.H. Nasr, Ideals and Realites of Islam (San
Francisco: Acquarian, 1994); A. Guillaume, Islam (London:
Penguin, 1954); and Azra Kidwai, Islam (Delhi: Roli, 1998).
Also see D.E. Eikelman, 'Islam and the Language of
Modernity,' Daedalus (129: 1, Winker 2000), pp. 118-135.
13. See Krishna Kumar, Political Agenda of Education (New
Delhi: Sage, 1991); Bernard Cohn, Colonisation and the
Forms of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1996).
14. Rubina Saigol, Knowledge and Identity (Lahore: ASR, 1995).
15. For an overview of Pakistan's system of education, see
Parvez Hoodbhoy (ed.), Education and the State: Fifty Years
of Pakistan (Karachi: OUP, 1998); Tariq Rahman, Language,
Education and Culture (Karachi: OUP, 1999). Also see Abdur
Rauf, 'Education in Development' in H. Gardezi and J.
Rashid, (eds.), Pakistan: The Roots of Dictatorship (London:
Zed Books, 1983), pp. 328-339.
16. Ayesha Jalal, 'Conjuring Pakistan: History as Official
Imagining,' Journal of Middle East Studies (27: 1995), pp. 73-
89.
17. See Mubarak Ali, In the Shadow of History (Lahore: Fiction
House, 1998), P.A. Hoodbhoy and A.H. Nayyar, 'Rewriting
the History of Pakistan' in Asghar Khan (ed.), Islam, Politics
and the State (London: Zed Books, 1985), pp. 164-177. Also
see Ayesha Jalal, ibid.
Notes 255
18. Dietrich Reetz, 'National Consolidation and Fragmentation

of Pakistan: the Dilemma of General Zia-ul-Haq (1977-88),'
in D. Weidemann (ed.), Nationalism, Ethnicity and Political
Development (New Delhi: Manohar, 1991), pp. 123-144.
19. Jamal Malik, Colonization of Islam (New Delhi: Manohar,
1996), p. 20.
20. Tanika Sarkar, 'Educating the Children of the Hindu Rashtra,'
op. cit.
21. See Krishna Kumar, 'Origins of India's Textbook Culture,'
Comparative Education Review (32: 4, 1988), pp. 452-65.
22. Ayesha Jalal, 'Conjuring Pakistan,' op. cit.
23. Ayesha Jalal, ibid.
5. Freedom Struggle As a Narrative

l. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso,
1983).
2. R. Rennie, 'History and Policy Making,' International Social
Science Journal (156: June 1998), pp. 289-301.
3. Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1997).
4. For a discussion of the politics of mention, see A. Megill,
'History, Memory, Identity,' History of the Human Sciences,
(11: 3, 1999), pp. 37-62. Daud Ali, (ed.), Invoking the Past,
(Delhi: Oxford, 1999), presents several studies of the uses
which history-writing has served in South Asia.
5. Every commission on education appointed since Independence
in both India and Pakistan has lamented the ills of the
examination system and has suggested reforms which proved
either too hard to implement within the existing structure of
the system of education or had a short life. Books and
reports written on Indian education before Independence
carry an identical lament, indicating that the examination
256 Notes
system exemplifies a continuity in educational policies since

colonial days. For a discussion of this and other aspects of
the continuity, see Krishna Kumar, Political Agenda of
Education, op. cit.
6. Bipan Chandra, Modem India: A History Textbook for Class
XII (New Delhi: NCERT, 1990; rep. 1998), foreword.
7. A committee was set up by the Ministry of Human Resource
Development in 1992 for the drafting of a syllabus for post-
Independence history. Although it met several times and
considered a number of strategies to introduce post-
Independence history, it could not conclude its work and
recommend a plan.
8. Sandra B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community (Delhi:
OUP, 1990).
9. Marjorie Sykes makes the point in 'Moral Education',
Seminar (297: May 1984).
10. K.M. Munshi, op. cit.
6. A Beginning Located
1. R.C. Majumdar, The Sepay Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857
(Calcutta: Mukhopadhyay, 1957). For excerpts from other
works on 1857 and critical commentaries, see Ainslie T.
Embree (ed.), India in 1857 (Delhi: Chanakya, 1987).
2. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (first published,
1946; Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Fund, 1981), p. 327.
3. Tapti Roy, The Politics of a Popular Uprising (Delhi: OUP,
1994), p. 258.
4. K.K. Aziz, The Murder of History (Delhi: Renaissance, 1998),
p. 126.
5. A Short History of Hind-Pakistan (Karachi: Pakistan History
Society, 1955).
6. Percival Spear, A History of India, Vol. 2 {London: Penguin,
1965), p. 152.
Notes 257
7. For Ghalib's life and response to 1857, see Pavan K. Varma,

Ghalib (Delhi, Penguin, 1989).
8. Narayani Gupta, Delhi Between Two Empires (Delhi: OUP,
1981).
9. Khwaja Husain Nizami, The Stories of 1857 (New Delhi:
National Book Trust, 1997). For an unabridged Hindi
translation, see Begamat Ke Aansu, {Delhi: Swarnajayanti,
1998).
10. Rudyard Kipling, Second Jungle Book {1895; London:
Macmillan, 1965).
7. Awakening and Anxiety

1. Leaming without Burden, (New Delhi: 1984), is popularly
known as the Yashpal Committee report. The committee
was appointed by the Ministry of Human Resource
Development, Government of India, under the chairmanship
of Professor Yash pal, to recommend ways in which children
might be relieved of the burdensome curriculum they are
required to pursue.
2. National Education Policy 1998-2010 (Islamabad: Government
of Pakistan, Ministry of Education, 1998).
3. Social Studies, Gujarat, VIII, p. 32.
4. A compact commentary on democracy and modernity in
India, focusing on the power of caste and communal ideas,
can be found in Sudipto Kaviraj, 'Modernity and Politics in
India,' Daedalus {129: 1, winter 2000); pp. 136-162. Also see
Sunil Khilnani, 'The Balance of Democracy,' in Romila
Thapar {ed.), India, Another Millennium? (Delhi: Penguin,
2000), pp. 108-122.
5. Pakistan Studies, Punjab, VIII, p. 72.
6. Rubina Saigol, Symbolic Violence {Lahore: SAHE, 2000).
7. Chandra, Modem India, XII, p. 177.
258 Notes
8. Hussain, An Illustrated History of Pakistan, p. 101.

9. Hussain's text (ibid) is the only school book which gives a
map of the railway network available in this period.
10. Sarwar, An Introduction to Pakistan Studies, p. 38.
11. Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (New York: Oxford,
1984), p. 26.
12. Bajwa, Pakistan, p. 86.
13. Sumit Sarkar, Modern Inrlia (New Delhi: Macmillan, 1983),
p. 122.
8. Unity and Break-Up

1. For Gandhi's impact on the freedom movement, see A.
Copley, Gandhi Against the Tide {Or.ford: OUP, 1987);
Anthony J. Parel's long introduction to Hind Swaraj
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) also provides
an insight into Gandhi as a moral philosopher. For the
'moral' aims of colonial education, see Krishna Kumar,
Political Agenda of Education, op. cit.
2. Chandra, Modern India, XII, p. 207.
3. K.K. Aziz, The Murder of History, op. cit.
6. Ibid, foreword.
7. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, op. cit., p. 225.
8. Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1951; London:
Granada, 1982), p. 252.
9. R. Palme Dutt, India Today (Bombay: People's Publishing
House, 1949).
10. Social Studies, Gujarat, VIII, p. 96.
11. Mushirul Hasan, National and Communal Politics in India
(New Delhi: Manohar 1979).
Notes 259
12. B.R. Nanda, Mahatma Gandhi (1958; Delhi: OUP, 1989), p.

135.
13. Mushirul Hasan, National and Communal Politics in India,
op. cit., p. 193.
14. Marjorie Sykes, 'Moral Education,' Seminar (297: May 1984).
15. Mushirul Hasan, National and Communal Politics in India,
op. cit.
16. Arjun Dev and Indira Arjun Dev, Modem India, VIII, 212.
18. See Krishna Kumar, Leaming/ram Conflict, op. cit., p. 1996.
19. See Sandra B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community, op.
cit. Also see Anil Seal, Emergence of Indian Nationalism
(New Delhi: S. Chand, 1968).
20. Mushirul Hasan, National and Communal Politics in India.
Also see Uma Kaura, Muslims and Indian Nationalism (Delhi:
Manohar, 1977).
21. On Jinnah's relationship with the Congress, see Rajmohan
Gandhi, Understanding the Muslim Mind (New Delhi: Penguin,
1987); Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (New York:
OUP, 1984). Also see Uma Kaura, ibid.
9. Contrary Imaginations
1. Ayesha Jalal, 'Conjuring Pakistan', op. cit.
2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities; op. cit.
3. Louis Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, op. cit.
4. Percival Spear, A History of India, op. cit.
5. Krishna Kumar, Political Agenda of Education, op. cit.
6. S.F. Mahmud, A Short History of Inda-Pakistan, p. 248.
7. For India, see Sudipto Kaviraj, 'Modernity and Politics in
India,' op. cit., and the essays in Seminar (400: December
260 Notes
1992). For Pakistan, see Akeel Bilgrani, 'What is a Muslim?

Fundamental Commitment and Cultural Identity' in
Gyanendra Pandey (ed.), Hindus and Others (New Delhi:
Penguin, 1993), pp. 273-299; Dale F. Eickelman, 'Islam and
the Language of Modernity'; op. cit.
8. Rabbani and Sayyid, Introduction to Pakistan Studies, p. 80.
11. Ibid, p. 139.
12. Judith Brown, Gandhi, Prisoner of Hope (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989), p. 254.
13. On the political tensions that arose in UP after Congress
victory, see Mukul Kesavan, '1937 as a Landmark in the
Course of Communal Politics in UP,' Occasional Papers,
2nd series, XI, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library,
November 1988. Also see C. Khaliquzzaman, Pathway to
Pakistan (Lahore: Longman, 1961).
14. On the Hindu-Urdu controversy, its history and implications,
see Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism (New Delhi: Orient
Longman, 2001).
15. M. Mujeeb, 'The Partition of India in Retrospect' in Mushirul
Hasan (ed.) India's Partition, op. cit., pp. 403-414.
16. For the Congress's mass contact programme, see Mushirul
Hasan, 'The Muslim Mass Contact Campaign: Analysis of a
Strategy of Political Mobilisation' in Mushirul Hasan (ed.),
India's Partition, op. cit., pp. 133-159. For Zakir Husain's
life ~nd work during the late 1930s, see M. Mujeeb, Zakir
Husain (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1972).
17. Bagli, History and Civics, X, p. 121.
18. See Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism, op. cit. Also see, Krishna
Kumar, Political Agenda of Education, op. cit.
19. Sarwar, An Introduction to Pakistan Studies, p. 69.
Notes 261
20. Rabbani and Sayyid, Introduction to Pakistan Studies, p. 39.

21. Pakistan Studies, Punjab IX-X, p. 38-39.
23. Quoted in B.R. Goel (ed.), Documents on Social, Moral and
Spiritual Values in Education (New Delhi: NCERT, 1979~
p. 41.
24. Hussain, An Illustrated History of Pakistan, p._ 143.
25. M. Mujeeb, 'The Partition of India in Retrospect', op. cit.
26. M. Mujeeb, Zakir Husain, op. cit.
27. See Lance Brennan, 'The Illusion of Security: The Background
to Muslim Separation in the United Provinces' in Mushirul
Hasan (ed.), India's Partition, op. cit., pp. 322-360.
28. M. Mujeeb, 'The Partition of India in Retrospect,' op. cit.
29. Ibid.
30. Mumtaz Shah Nawaz, The Heart Divided, op. cit. See preface
to the new edition by Ahmed Shah Nawaz, and publisher's
note.
31. Ibid. p. 329-330.
10. Glory and Grief: The Final Years

1. See Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, op. cit., pp. 388-398. Also
see Francis Hutchins, Spontaneous Revolution (Delhi:
Manohar, 1971).
2. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, op. cit.
3. See C.H. Philips and M.D. Wainwright, (eds.), The Partition
of India (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970), especially the
articles by A.G. Noorani and B. Shiva Rao.
5. On Congress-League relations in this phase, see Humayun
Kabir's essay in C.H. Philips and M.D. Wainwright, (eds.),
262 Notes
The Partition ofIndia, op. cit. Also see, Leonard Mosley, The
Last Days of the British Raj (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1961). A comparative study of Partition politics in three
countries, which offers an innovative interpretation of
Congress-League-British interaction, has been made by T.G.
Fraser, Partition in Ireland, India and Palestine {London:
Macmillan, 1984).
6. What might have happened if India had not been divided in
1947? An interesting analysis of counterfactuals can be found
in N.C. Saxena, 'Historiography of Communalism in India,'
in Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends
in Colonial India (Delhi: Manohar, 1981), pp. 302-325.
8. Sucheta Mahajan, Partition and Independence, op. cit., p. 374.
9. Ashis Nandy, 'Final Encounter: The Politics of the
Assassination of Gandhi,' Robin Jeffry, et al (eds.), India:
Rebellion to Republic (New Delhi: Sterling, 1991), pp. 97-125,
offers a psychoanalytic interpretation. For a critique of
textbook representation of Gandhi's murder, see Krishna
Kumar, Learning from Conflict, op. cit.
10. Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985).
11. See Humayun Kabir's essay in C.H. Philips and M.D.
Wainwright (eds.), The Partition of India, op. cit. Also see,
R.J. Moore, 'Jinnah and the Pakistan Demand,' Modern
Asian Studies (17: 4, 1983), pp. 529-561. On the League's
expansion in Punjab, see David Gilmartin, Empire and Islam
(Delhi: OUP, 1989).
14. Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History (Karachi: OUP,
1998), p. 81.
Notes 263
15. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, op. cit., p. 448. Also see,
Pyarelal, Thrown to the Wolves (Calcutta: Eastlight, 1966).
16. Bagli, History and Civics, X, p. 150.
17. Punjab, Pakistan Studies, IX-X, p. 21.
18. Gyanendra Pandey, 'The Prose of Otherness,' in D. Arnold
and D. Hardiman (eds.), Subaltern Studies Vol. VIII (Delhi:
OUP, 1994).
19. See, for in~tance, B. Fay et al (eds.), History and Theory
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Also see Richard J. Evans, In
Defence of History, op. cit.
20. Mushirul Hasan, 'Memories of a Fragmented Nation:
Rewriting the Histories of India's Partition,' Economic &
Political Weekly (10 October 1998), pp. 2662-68.
11. Children Write About Pakistan
1. The best guide to the rift between Pakistan's two worlds-

the anglicized world of the elite and the vernacular world of
the common people-is Jamal Malik's Colonisation of Islam,
op. cit. Also see Tariq Anwar's Language, Education and
Culture, op. cit. For the Indian scene, see Krishna Kumar,
Learning from Conflict, op. cit.
2. For the rise of fundamentalism, see S.V.R. Nasr, 'Islamic
Opposition to the Political Process: Lessons from Pakistan,'
in J.L. Esporito (ed.), Political Islam (London: Boulder,
1997), pp. 135-154.
3. Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control, Vol. I (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).
4. Socialization has been discussed in Chapter 2. For a discussion
of the school's role in relation to primary socialization, see
What is Worth Teaching by Krishna Kumar (New Delhi:
Orient Longman, Rev. ed. 1997).
264 Notes
12. History and Peace

1. Mary Warnock, Memory (London: Faber and Faber, 1987}.
Why memory and history should not be treated as one has
been discussed by A. Megill in 'History, Memory, Identity,'
op. cit. Also see Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History, op.
cit.
2. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence (New Delhi:
Penguin, 1998}.
3. Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography (London: Routledge,
1999), p. 155.
4. Padma M. Sarangapani, 'The Great Indian Tradition,' Seminar
(493: September 2000), pp. 14-17.
5. The National Curriculum Framework (New Delhi: NCERT,
2001} mentions the possibility that 'the quantum of history
may have to be substantially reduced'.
6. Ibid.
7. National Education Policy, 1998-2010 (Pakistan), op. cit.
8. · For papers on recent reforms in the teaching of history in
some countries, see Prospects (28: 2, 1998}.
Index
Afghanistan, Bangladesh, 45
Soviet invasion of, 44, 61 Bardoli, 142, 144
Agra, 148 Bareilly, 148
Ahmed, Khaled, 46 Behera, Navnita Chadha, 9
Ahmedabad, 166 Bengal, partition of, 118-19,
Ali, Mohammad, 172 121-22, 148, 216
Ali, Rahmat, 179, 200-01 Bentinck, William, 98, 108
Aligarh Movement, 110 Bentley, Michael, 241
Allahabad, 148, 169, 173 Berger, Peter L., 19
Ambedkar, B.R., 168-69, 173 Bernstein, Basil, 237
Amritsar, 135 Bhagat Singh, 128
Anderson, Benedict, 70, 162 Bharatiya Janata Party, 62
Anti-colonial movement, 8 Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 6
Anti-Partition Movement, 122 Bias, 211
Ashraf, K.M., 178 Bihar, 216
Attlee, Clement, 204 Bombay, 144-45
Azad, 209 Bose, Subhas Chandra, 198
Aziz, K.K., 97, 132 Brahmo Samaj, 118
266 Index
British India Association, 118 teaching of freedom struggle

Brown, Judith, 174 to, 29-48
Bundelkhand, 93 Civil Disobedience Movement,
Burma, 10 156-57, 164-65, 167-74, 198
Butalia, Urvashi, 241 Communal Award, 168
Communalism, 206-07, 209
Cabinet Mission, 203-06, 212
Congress, 62, 86, 110, 113-23,
Central Board of Secondary
128, 130, 134-35, 137, 139-
Education (CBSE), 11, 109
42, 148-49, 154, 156-59, 165,
Central Training College,
167, 169-73, 176-91, 193-94,
Lahore, 3
197, 199, 201-02, 204-14
Chagai, 1 Congress-League unity, 126
Chagla, M.C., 51-52 Cripps Mission, 196-98, 206
Champaran struggle, 123, 127, Cultural awakening, 106-07
138 Curriculum policy, in India,
Chauri Chaura incident, 127, 50-51
136-37, 141-45 in Pakistan, 55-57
Children,
early socialization of, 16-20 Dandi March, 165-67, 171, 173
education, 2, 5-12 Defence Day, Pakistan, 45
Dehradun, 148
on division of India and
Delhi, 41, 216, 225
Pakistan, 226-38
Delhi-Lahore bus service, 33
intellectual development, 22-
Direct Action Day, 215
23
Divide and rule policy, 119-
learning at school, 20-28
20, 234
learning of mathematics, 27
Durkheim, Emile, 16
past and, 15-28
Dutt, R. Palme, 142
psycho-social response to
past, 15-28 East Pakistan, creation of, 124
socialization of, 8, 15 Education,
Primary, 16, 18-20, 38 and religion, 55-62
Secondary, 20 systems of, 20
Index 267
Elphinstone, 119 memory posters, 81-86

England, 245 as narrative, 69-86
Europe, 44 nation-building process, 32
Nehru Report, 155-59
Federal Curriculum Wing,
pacing, 72-73
Pakistan, 63
parties and politics, 116-25
Fighting people, self-image of,
politics of mention, 72-75
82
post-1857 period, 102-25
Fischer, Louis, 142, 165-67
Quit India Movement, 201-
Freedom, concept of, 29
02
Freedom movement/struggle,
revolt of 1857, 87-93
awakening and anxiety, 102-
salient features, 72-75
25
self-perception about in
beginning of, 87-101 India, 33-40, 46-48
Cabinet Mission, 203-06 Pakistan, 40-48
communal harmony, 126-47 teaching at schools, 29-48
communal violence, 147-55 in textbooks, see, textbooks
conception of end, 72-73
divergence perceptions, 75- Freitag, Sandra B., 79
81 Gandhi, Indira, 51
early 1930s, 160-75 Gandhi, Mahatma, 31, 51, 76,
Gandhi's contribution to, 78, 86, 106, 122-23, 127-47,
137-47 150, 152, 155, 165-69, 172-
historical memory of, 32 74, 176-77, 183-87, 191-92,
identity-building in national 196-99, 201-02, 204, 206,
context, 33, 72 208-10, 215, 220-21, 234
in Indian and Pakistani Young India, 166
school textbooks, 2, 7-8, Gandhi-Ambedkar agreement,
11-12, 32 173
Khilafat Movement, 132-37 Gandhi-Irwin pact, 171
Lahore Resolution, 199-202 Gandhi-Jinnah talks m 1944,
late 1930s, 175-83 204
268 Index
Gandhian Basic Education, peace and, 239-46

177-78, 183-94 religion uses in, 55-62
Gawalia Tank Maidan, 199 representation of at school,
Germany, 245 26-27
Ghalib, 39, 100 secular and communal
Gorakhpur, 144 ideology, 50-54
Government of India Act of state policy for teaching of,
1935, 169, 175-76 244-46
Gujarat, 143, 165 as subject in school, 4-6
teaching of in India and
Haider, Dada Mir, 173
Pakistan, 6-8, 28-48
Hasan, Mushirul, 144-45, 156,
understanding of, 24-28
220
Hobsbawn, Eric, 49, 71
Hijrat Movement, 133
Husain, Zakir, 178, 188, .192
Hind-Pakistan, 98
Hindu communalism, 34, 37 identity-building process, 33
Hindu Mahasabha, 150, 154, India,
201 education system in, 5-12
Historical understanding, heritage, 63-65, 77
criteria of, 24-27 secular/communal ideology
History, and textbooks in, 50-54
curriculum and textbook self-perception in, 33-40, 46-
policy, 50-51 48
debate on school history, teaching of history in, 6-8,
242-43 28-48
freedom struggle, Indian Council of Secondary
identity building, 33 Education (ICSE), 11, 124,
as narrative, 69-101 169, 179, 205, 215
nation-building process, 32 Indian Independence Act, 215
see also, Freedom Indian National Army (INA),
movement/struggle 198-99
self-perception in, 33-48 Indian Ordnance Factory, 30
Index 269
Indian textbooks, J allianwalla Bagh massacre,

Basic Education in, 183-94 127, 131, 201
brevity in, 202-09 Jamaat-e-Islami, 236
Cabinet Mission, 203-06 Janata Party, 53
communal harmony in, 126- Jinnah, M.A., 31, 42, 76, 85,
47 121, 128, 131, 135, 137, 146,
communal violence, 147-55 155-56, 158, 162, 169, 171-
early 1930s in, 160-75 74, 179-81, 194, 200-01, 209-
freedom struggle in, 87-93 11, 228, 230
Gandhi in, 137-47
Kakar, Sudhir, 38
late 1930s in, 175-83
Kamal Pasha, 149-50
Kamleshwar, 38
parties and politics in, 116-
Kanpur, 148
17
Karachi Khilafat Conference
post-1857 period, 102-09,
1921, 144
116-17
Kashmir issue, 43, 221, 228,
Quit India Movement, 196-
234-35
99
Kerala, 143
revolt of 1857, 87-93
Khan, Abdul Ghaffar, 173
violence sidelined in, 214-20
Khan, Ayub, 60
Indo-Pak relations, 1-3, 9-10,
Khan, Liaquat Ali, 212-13
32, 38-39
Khan, Syed Ahmad, 76, 80,
Iqbal, Allama, 76, 169, 172-74,
85, 97-98, 110, 112-16, 200-
179-80, 200-01, 212, 230
01, 210
Iqbal Park, 199
Khilafat Movement, 127-28,
Irwin, 167
131-37, 144-47, 149, 158,
Islamic fundamentalism, 62
168, 172, 188
Islamization, 7, 44, 75, 146,
Khudai Khidmatgars, 173
236
Kipling, Rudyard, 101
Jalal, Ayesha, 60, 64-65, 162, Knowledge,
211 classification of, 17-18
270 Index
of past events, 21, 23 Mountbatten Plan, 215

Kosovo, 231 Mujeeb, M., 177-78, 187-90,
Kothari Commission, 51 192
Munshi, K.M., 37
Lahore, 39, 41-42, 190, 225-26
Muslim League, 85-86, 110,
Lahore Resolution, 199-202,
119-21, 123-25, 128, 135,
210
150, 156, 168, 172-74, 177-
Lakshmi Bai, 30
82, 190, 194, 199-202, 204-
London, 171
05, 211-14
Luckmann, Thomas, 19
Muslim nationalism, 162
Lucknow, 148
Mysore war, 30
Lucknow Pact of 1916, 123-
24, 127, 132 NADRA, 31
Macaulay, 108 Nagpur, 191

Mahajan, Sucheta, 209 Naidu, Sarojini, 167
Mahmud, S.F., 100, 169-70, Nanda, 145
211 Naoroji, Dadabhai, 107, 119,
Mahmudabad, 135 121
Majlis-i-Khilafat, 135 Nation-building process, 32,
Majumdar, R.C., 89 51, 129, 161
Malabar, 151 Nation-states, 5, 15, 55, 58
Malaviya, 155 National Book Trust, 101
Malik, Jamal, 61 National Council of
Meerut Conspiracy Case, 173 Educational Research and
Militancy in Kashmir, 40 Training (NCERT), 11, 50-
Minto Park, 199 54, 63, 77, 88, 90, 106, 108,
Montague-Chelmsford 114, 122, 131-32, 137-39, 148-
reforms, 127 49, 152, 164-65, 168-69, 180,
Moonje, 155 196, 203, 215, 243
Moplah killings, 144-45 Nationalism, ideology of, 6,
Mountbatten, 211, 214-15 12, 206-07, 209, 218
Index 271
Nawaz, Mumtaz Shah, 40, 190 192, 217, 219, 242

Nehru, Jawaharlal, 69-70, 92, Pakistani nation-state, 6
167, 172-74, 180, 198, 206, Pakistani textbooks,
209 Basic Education, 183-94
Nehru, Motilal, 155 communal harmony in, 126-
Nehru Report, 128, 131, 133, 47
150, 154-59, 162, 168, 245 communal violence, 147-55
Nizami Khwaja Husain, 101 early 1930s in, 160-75
Non-cooperation Movement, freedom struggle in, 87, 93-
127-28, 131-36, 141, 143-50, 101
156, 167-68, 174, 198 Khilafat Movement, 132-37
Non-violent civil disobedience, Lahore Resolution, 199-202
129, 142, 144 late 1930s, 175-83
Objectives Resolution 1949, 75
parties and politics, 116-25
Ottoman empire, 134
post-1857 period, 110-25
Pakistan, profusion in, 209-14
curriculum policy, 55-57 Quit India Movement, 201-
education policy and 02
religion, 5-12, 56-62 revolt of 1857, 93-101
Federal Curriculum Wing, Syed Ahmad Khan, 112-16
63 violence sidelined in, 214-20
heritage, 63-65, 77 Pal, Kristo Das, 118
national self-awareness, 44 Pandey, Gyanendra, 219
self-perception in, 40-48 Pandey, Mangal, 94
teaching of history in, 6-8, Partition, 8, 25-26, 40-43, 54-
28-48 55, 74, 85, 111, 121, 151-52,
Pakistan Historical Society, 98 154, 163, 175, 182, 189-90,
Pakistan Movement, 60, 75, 200-01, 203, 205-09, 211,
95, 116, 162, 231 213-21, 227-36, 241
Pakistan Studies, 60, 97, 132, Patel, Sardar, 37
272 Index
Piaget's theory, 22-23 Rowlatt Act, 131

Plassey, battle of, 30 Roy, Raja Rammohan, 98, 106,
Pokhran, 1 118
Poona Pact, 168-69, 172 Roy, Tapti, 93
Powell, Avril, 9 Rudolph, L.I., and Rudolph,
Prarthna Samaj, 118 S.H., 53
Primary socialization, 16, 18-
20, 38 Sabarmati, 166
Prince of Wales visit, 144-45 Saberwal, Satish, 37-38
Punjab, {India), 148, 151, Saharanpur, 148
(Pak), 216 Saigol, Rubina, 111
Punjab Textbook Board, (Pak), Sangh Parivar, 36
95, 185 Sarangapani, 242
Purna Swaraj, 170 Saraswati schools, 62
Sarkar, S., 142
Quit India Movement, 169,
176, 196-99, 201-02 Saunders, 128
Qureshi, I.H., 56 Savarkar, V.D., 92, 177, 200
Secondary Education
Radcliffe A ward, 211
Commission, 50-51
Rai, Lala Lajpat, 127, 201
Secondary socialization, 20
Rajagopalachari, C., 198
Secularism, concept of, 34-36,
Ramjanmabhoomi movement,
38-39, 53
34
Self-rule, 135
Red Fort Delhi, 101
Shahjahanpur, 148
Reetz, Dietrich, 61
Shukla, Ravi Shankar, 189
Religio-terrorism, m Punjab,
Simla Conference, 204
34
Rennie, 71 Simon Commission, 127, 147,
Revolt of 1857, 87-106, 146, 150, 156, 165, 171
245 Sind, 10, 94
Round Table Conferences, Sirajuddaula, 30
168-72, 174 socialization, 8, 15
Index 273
Primary, 16, 18-20, 38 Nehru Report, 155-59

Secondary, 20 Pakistani textbooks, see,
socio-cultural reforms, 102-09 Pakistani textbooks
Somnath temple, 37 parties and politics in, 116-
South Africa, 130, 138 25
Soviet Union, 3 post-1857 period in, 102-25
Spear, Percival, 99, 167 reform movement, 102-25
Sri Lanka, 10 secular vs communal
Sutlej, 211 ideology, 50-54
Swadeshi movement, 122 Syed Ahmad Khan in, 112-
Swaraj movement, 135-36 16
Swaraj party, 148 uses of religion in, 55-62
Thapar, Romila, 52
Tacit knowledge, 16-18
Tilak, 119, 128
Tagore, Dwarkanath, 118
Tipu Sultan, 30
Tagore, Rabindranath, 123
Turkey, 149-50
Talbot, Ian, 214
Two-nation theory, 113, 116,
Tamil Nadu, 143, 165
200, 206-07
Tara Chand, 123
Textbooks, US, 3, 44
Basic Education in, 183-94 Unionist Party, 213
communal harmony in, 126-
Vande Mataram, 183-85, 187,
47
191
communal violence, 147-55
Vijay Diwas (Victory Day),
Gandhi in, 137-47
India, 45
history of early 1930s and
'Vote banks' theory, 35-36
late 1930s in, 160-83
ideology and, 49-65 Waliullah, Shah, 85
Indian textbooks, see, Indian Wardha Scheme, 176-77, 183-
textbooks 94
Khilafat Movement in 132- Vidya Mandir Scheme, 191
37 Widdia Mander scheme, 185
274 Index
Wardha Education Zafar, Bahadur Shah, 90, 94,

Committee, 188 97
Wavell, 212 Zia-ul-Haq, 6, 10, 59-60
World War II, 163, 176

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Contents

PART I: CHALLENGE OF THE PAST

2. Children and the Past 15

PART II: RIVAL HISTORIES

5. Freedom Struggle As a Narrative 69

PART III: FUTURE PROSPECTS

11. Children Write About Partition 225

List of Textbooks 247

The idea' of this book has a rather long and fortuitous

would encourage closer examination of issues like the

Rubina Saigol, Mr Anwar Kamaal, Arifa Noor and Yvette

would have been impossible without the guarantee of

Although the focus of this book is rather specific,

Inda-Pak relationship since my childhood. Indeed, the

visit Lahore. Apart from other institutions, I was able to

anxiety that lack of news about a hostile relative residing

Pakistan has sowed the seeds of permanent hostility towards

subject, history comes under the strain of nation-building

'Islamization'. Moves of a similar nature are now afoot in

of history teaching but a rare practice in both India and

Early on, I found to my astonishment that studies of

an awareness presented a special challenge in the case of

The Indian case, and therefore my sample for India, is

understand why the story of the freedom struggle takes the

Challenge of the Past

Long before children have the capacity, and find the

shape attitudes, beliefs and behaviour during later life.

As an inheritance, the past requires the young to submerge

river in spate or a spider protecting a cave may become a

immediate others. Language, as a repository of shared

childhood can be said to have an all-embracing, immersion

expected of them as obedient citizens. Depending on the

possibility of guessing and discovering it, for instance, by

and simultaneity.7 These are some of the key attainments

form an idea of past events and the persons involved in

common terms like 'order', 'rule', 'conflict' and 'power' in

or trying to make it happen. To understand and to explain

requirement that as readers of history, we should not allow

child's cognitive capacity to make sense of history. If the

The history of the freedom struggle taught to school-

indeed it is m all once-colonized countries. The label,

does so unobtrusively, by means of careful graphic crafting.

image as a reminder of the unfinished business of the

either a strongly hostile or a weakly friendly articulation

vary greatly, depending on the region, the generation and

many of the students whom I taught during this period

banks' theory has other implications as well. Just as the

hand were exposed in some manner to the views propagated

should perhaps be seen in relation to the long-standing

to, if not identical with, the Hindu revivalist critique of

cinema for a long time. It has been a staple item in

widening gap between Hindus and Muslims of northern

youngsters think remained quite limited.

for survival. One of the arguments used for justifying the

vaster economic inequality and the absence of a stable

school kids or college youth even in institutional magazines,

Most important, the perception that Pakistan was not a

already harsh political reality in lurid colours. Like the

Educational activity of any kind depends on a text,

represented in textbooks written for school-children assumes