Amidst the chaos and uncertainty in the academic year of 2021-22, as students and teachers alike learnt to grapple with the online mode of teaching, NCERT used the time to quietly edit the contents of its History and Political Science textbooks from classes 6 to 12. Official communication stated that the revisions were a way to lighten the academic load during the pandemic and do away with instances of repetition in the syllabus. Historians, both in India and abroad, quickly noticed an alarmingly unsavoury pattern in the deleted topics: sections on topics ranging from the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi to the rule of the Mughals in northern India had been greatly diminished or glossed over, references to the Naxalite movement and the Gujarat riots of 2002 had been omitted, and an overall reduction in the mentions of Dalit writers and activists was observed. In their defence, the board pointed out that no chapters had been completely deleted, and the content had only been “rationalised” to make sure that students would study more “approachable topics”, and ignore the ones that were “irrelevant in the present context.” What kind of history is being left out of the textbooks, and more importantly, what is included in them?
Ernest Renan, at a conference in Sorbonne in 1882, said that the act of nation-making is an excellent exercise in forgetting. The idea of the ‘nation’ is not even three hundred years old – yet a country’s national consciousness is construed to establish as if it predates its actual creation. One can talk about the “Indian civilization” with as much vigour as possible, but in reality, the civilization in question was never “Indian” in the modern sense, and modern India did not come into existence as a direct result of this civilization. Nations lay claim to kings and battles, heroes and myths that have feeble connections to the ones we inhabit now. These events create a web that reaches past the ‘modern’ divide of time to lend a notion of the traditional to new ideas such as ‘national brotherhood’. Models of societal unity today lie divorced from historical conceptions of belongingness.
To create an ideologically and spiritually homogenous nation, you have to create a history that people can collectively look back at. Once you successfully establish the myth of a common origin, the claim to a continued future is immediately satisfied, no matter how removed from the truth the ‘claimed’ origins are. Any event(s) can be taken into account and discarded to create the mould that will fit inside the ‘ideal’ Citizen. As the idea of this Citizen changes, the histories that make the mould change, too. Hence, we see the glaring absence of chapters dealing with the Mughal period or the Naxalites in History textbooks around India today. The ‘ideal’ Citizen can know only ‘ideal’ things – because the myth can only legitimise so many things in its quest to create a common backstory. We must first forget before inventing the nation, for a blank slate is needed to fit together a new pattern of history.
Since new nations have space only for one specific type of citizen – the Model Citizen who knows the ‘origin’ of the nation and believes in it completely – they must be created anew with every change in their current socio-political environment. They must have a shared sense of history with their fellow people that affirms their feelings of belonging and rationalises their idea of unity with their ‘imagined community’ of the nation – and do it in a way that is accepted by the nation. According to Benedict Anderson, imagination is what creates a sense of unity among the members of a bounded sovereign nation. They imagine themselves physically linked by the state, and thus hold a sense of understanding even of people they have never met, and might never meet, as long as the physical boundary of the nation gives them a common identity.
It is by acknowledging a common history that their participation in this community is affirmed. If the specific history of the nation and the ideals it espouses are not accepted by the individual, they can no longer participate in the nation, or lay claim to its belongingness, and are met with suspicion. They are no longer part of the group with the shared history, and as such are alienated from the ‘in-group’ that has bound itself together in the imagined annals of history.
Rogers Brubaker, while discussing France through the lens of the ‘national’ Revolution, proposes that upon the establishment of a French nation, very little changed in the actual stratification of the population, but ideas of belonging and entrance into the civic entity of France began to evolve with the creation of the notion of citizenship. A citizen of France was someone who was automatically assumed to be a believer in the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity because it was in the legacy of these ideals that France had become an autonomous, governed space. These ideas defined a distinctly French disposition, and all those who shared this disposition were free to partake in the French nation. There was no conception, even, of a French citizen who did not share these ideals. The nation-state represented ‘new’ national values superseding ‘old’ subnational boundaries.
Nations in modern spaces operate in an increasingly dual manner. They simultaneously carve a new identity and make a break from the past. They also represent the continuation of a great tradition and the reincarnation of age-old principles, simply translated for modern times. The nation is a modern institution that appeals to a unity based on a ‘shared’ history, which can be customised by those in power: how do we understand this sense of unity, and why is it important that this ‘tailored history’, this ever-changing myth, should exist?
One critical aspect of the myth is that its temporal specificities are nebulous – it cannot be dated; it is ‘beyond time’ and happened ‘once’. The act of the myth-recital draws the audience away from themselves and puts them at the desired distance, where they are made aware of a ‘common fate’ shared by everyone who is part of the myth, and who believes in the myth. By being one since the ‘beginning of eternity’, they can constitute an identity that can be defended against attacks alleging artifice, and thus cannot be ‘exposed’ as ‘unnatural’.
By refusing to participate in this mythic history, the citizens of a nation can make themselves a non-member and an alien, and in doing so, profess an engagement with the Anti-Nation. By being legally a part of the nation but not ideologically, they become an agent for the transfer of anti-national (anti-community) ideas seeking to fray the threads of a tightly bound national identity. And thus the Anti-Nation is created, because the nation can’t hold, within its own ideological bounds, elements that refute the basis of its very existence. In disagreeing with the myth of the nation the anti-national element rejects the very basis of a civilised society. Especially when put in contrast to the ‘good citizen’ who adheres to the ideological nation’s history, the anti-national calls attention to itself as a terrorising agent. Its sole purpose is cast as a desire to disrupt law and order, simply because it is the enemy and means harm to ‘good’ and ‘right’ society.
The Indian Myth is one that has kept its people engaged for several decades now, but never as obviously and fanatically as it has in the last ten years. Under the aegis of a common fate bound by a common religion, all other factors contributing to the emergence of a country – such as the material realities of the empires that constituted the region, or their political relations with more faraway lands – are forced to recede. The religious-social bonds that tie people to one another become both the basis and the channels of communication of the myth. Once the majority is familiar with this idea of a common past, it becomes easy to legitimise the existence of a power that claims the status of its last surviving propagator. Nationalism then ceases to be defined by anything other than symbols of this myth (such as the victimised yet valourous Hindu male, or the upper-caste, self-sacrificing Hindu wife) of this great past, of this united dynasty that must be re-enacted once again to bring about the notion of ‘victory’ to ‘our people’ by rejuvenating it in the modern world.
Renan remarks that historians are the bane of the nation: in providing the food for the myth of the nation, they also uncover the truth of historical evidence and facts that threaten to destroy it. Once we look past the myth, and see history for what it is, it becomes easy to see the weaknesses in the fabric of our society, where facts have been distorted to bridge gaps and nuances erased to create divisions for political gain.
The nostalgia of a great, shared past of the nation that enables the mass phenomenon of ‘forgetting’ is also what allows for the myth to be so easily manipulated by anyone who desires to do so. By editing out parts of our history to create the space for a new sense of the nation, we create false identities centred on this shared past, subject to change at the drop of a hat as the histories themselves are forced to change. They are stable only so far as the reality they support remains stable, for another small ripple in the socio-political exigencies of today’s world could create a completely different past for India in the History textbooks of the country.
Lokayata 