India history debate after chapter on Mughals dropped

The deletion of a chapter on Mughal rulers from Indian school textbooks has sparked debate about how history should be taught to school children.

The discussion was prompted by the release of a new series of textbooks from the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), an autonomous organization of the federal Department of Education. NCERT oversees curriculum changes and textbook content for children taking exams under the government-run Central Board of Secondary Education.

Other changes include the removal of some references to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and the 2002 Gujarat state riots.

NCERT has said the changes, first announced last year as part of an exercise to “streamline” the curriculum, would not affect knowledge but would instead reduce the burden on children in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

However, critics argue that the omissions are worrying and will affect students’ understanding of their country.

They are particularly concerned about the removal of references to the Mughal dynasty and accuse NCERT of erasing parts of history that Hindu right-wing groups have been fighting for years.

Many right-wing activists and historians view the Mughals, who for centuries ruled much of the Indian subcontinent, as foreign invaders who plundered Indian lands and corrupted the country’s Hindu civilization.

“Students are learning the history of our nation at a deeply divided time. By removing what is uncomfortable or seen as uncomfortable, we don’t encourage them to think critically,” says Hilal Ahmed, who works on political Islam and teaches at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies.

Proponents of the exercise argue that some course corrections in school history books are necessary because those books place too much importance on Muslim rulers.

“Mughal rule was one of the bloodiest periods in Indian history,” says Makhan Lal, a historian and academic who has written many chapters for NCERT textbooks.

“Couldn’t we write more about the empire of the Vijay Nagar or the Cholas or the Pandyas instead?” he asks, referring to Hindu dynasties that ruled southern India.

However, others say this is an oversimplified and reductive understanding of India’s syncretic past.

“What is happening now is an indication that the Mughals were particularly violent – although indeed violence was part of royalty as an institution everywhere – and that they saw themselves primarily as Muslims, determined to torment Hindus,” says the historian and Author Manu S. Pillai.

“However, the record is more complicated,” he adds.

NCERT director Dinesh Saklani has called the debate over the curriculum “unnecessary” and clarified that Mughal history is still being taught to schoolchildren. The BBC reached out to Mr Saklani for comment, but he said he was no longer available for media inquiries.

History curriculum revisions are nothing new in India – textbooks have been revised under different governments in the past.

Mr Ahmed says reviewing textbooks is also advocated by scholars to find the right balance between content and learning outcomes. “History never ends, it is forever unfinished and unsolved, but history textbooks have to – and that’s why they are constantly being reviewed.”

But he adds that this should not come at the expense of a greater pursuit of knowledge.

The current deletions, says Mr. Ahmed, raise major pedagogical problems of withholding information without a sense of the tensions and contradictions that it embodies. Because history, he adds, isn’t just about rulers. It goes beyond dynasties and battles to look at administration, government and culture of a time. It is a framework through which a society understands itself.

“So when you remove something arbitrarily, you remove it from its context and make it distorting,” says Prof. Ahmed.

The removed chapter appeared in Grade 12 textbooks: Kings and Chronicles: The Mughal Courts.

The 30-page text traces the workings of the Mughal courts. Most of this was documented in long historical accounts commissioned by Mughal emperors. The chapter goes on to show how these “Mughal chronicles” presented the “empire as composed of many different ethnic and religious communities—Hindu, Jain, Zoroastrian, and Muslim.”

The deletion of the chapter is justified, says Mr Lal, as it has “nothing of historical value”.

“It’s only one chapter, after all — it’s not like Mughal history has been completely eliminated from the curriculum.”

He adds that Indian textbooks have long underestimated the brutality of Mughal rule, giving them disproportionate importance compared to Hindu kings. These so-called distortions, he says, have fueled decades of shame about ancient Indian culture and values.

“But the Indians are now reckoning with their old past,” he says.

While history isn’t necessarily some sort of competition, Pillai says emotive proposals like this eventually gain a foothold in politics and the public consciousness.

“There’s this emphasis on a Hindu history of India, deliberately lumping together Hindu figures on one side and the big, bad Mughals on the other.”

But brutality, Mr. Pillai adds, was not a trait exclusive to the Mughals — kings were generally violent people, and violence was a corollary of power well into the 19th century.

In addition, Mr. Pillai says that the Mughals also dominate popular imagination because they are young and continued to have cultural significance after their reign. To put that in perspective, the last Mughal Emperor was overthrown just about a decade before Gandhi was born; and earlier Indian nationalists like Dadabhai Naoroji came of age while the Emperor was still around.

So we know a lot more about the Mughals, he says, simply because they were younger—and records of their time abound compared to, say, the Cholas, who dispersed in the 13th century.

“Perhaps it’s these complexities that students should educate themselves about, rather than cutting out parts of the textbooks entirely,” adds Mr. Pillai.

Mr Ahmed says it’s ironic that some are repeating a colonial view of Indian history that sees ancient times as the Hindu past and the Middle Ages as the Muslim past. “They reduce India’s intersecting cultures and religions to a mere insider versus outsider debate, when the past is actually much more complicated,” he says.

He adds that there would be “a gap” in formal education if key parts of the story were arbitrarily removed.

“And it would lead to a very different kind of learning.”

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