'Palpable Falsehoods'

27 January 2006

Ms. Glee Johnson
President, California State Board of Education
1430 "N" Street, Room 5111
Sacramento, CA. 95814
FAX: 916-319-0175

Dear Ms. Johnson and Members of the State Board of Education,

I write to you in as a professor of Indian history at UCLA,as an Indian American presently resident in California who, as the father of twoschool-going children, is also heavily invested in the quality of educationoffered in state schools, and -- last but not least -- as a Hindu who is keenlyaware of the immensely diverse strands of belief, religious practice, andhistory that have gone into the making of what is today called "Hinduism". Iam at this moment concerned with a review, commenced by the California StateBoard of Education a few months ago, of those portions of school textbookspertaining to ancient India, and wish to affirm, in the most unequivocal terms,my unstinting support of the three member faculty review committee (or contentreview panel) comprised of Michael Witzel (Harvard), James Heitzman (UC Davis),and Stanley Wolpert (UCLA). I understand that the Hindu Education Foundation andthe Vedic Foundation, whose views have largely been endorsed by Professor ShivaBajpai of California State University (Northridge), have agitated for certainchanges with which the Content Review Panel (hereafter CRP) is not in agreement,and I should like to bring to your attention my views, which closely correspondwith those of the CRP, on some disputed matters.

Before proceeding, however, to a brief discussion of some ofthe proposed changes, I would like to alert you to some extremely significantfeatures of this debate. First, though I speak as an Indian-American, Hindu,resident of California, and a concerned citizen, in this matter I would like tobe viewed in the first instance as an historian of India and a scholar of Indianstudies more broadly. I find it admirable that the State Board of Educationshould permit citizens of the state to weigh in with their opinions about schooltextbooks, and it is the procedures allowed by the State Board and under statelaw that have permitted so many Indian Americans, whether Hindu or otherwise, aswell as those who are not Indian Americans, to express their views on thecontent of school textbooks. This is, after all, what it means to work under ademocratic system and to allow citizens a significant voice in matters thattouch upon such vital domains as education, schooling, family, and religion. Bythe same token, I believe it incumbent upon the State Board to recognize thatnot all opinions are equal, and that ultimately the decision about the text tobe incorporated in any textbook is best left to the determination of thosescholars who have devoted their working lives to a study of the subjects inquestion. Not only does the CRP consist of three senior scholars at leadingAmerican universities, but their views were endorsed in a letter to the Boardsigned by over 140 members of the profession, many of them senior scholars atleading research universities around the world, including the United States andIndia, who specialize in the study of India and South Asia. As far as I amaware, the Hindu Education Foundation and Vedic Foundation and their supportersdo not number among their ranks any academic specialists in Indian history orreligion other than Professor Bajpai himself. It is a remarkable fact that, in astate which has perhaps the leading public research university system in theUnited States, these two foundations could not find a single professor of Indianhistory or religion within the UC system (with its ten campuses) to supporttheir views. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that they would be hardpressed to find a single scholar at any research university in the United Stateswho would support their views.

Secondly, I would urge you to reject the attempt among somemembers of the Indian American community to project themselves as Hindus who, byvirtue of being Hindus, are entitled to have their views given precedence overthe views of scholars who may not be Hindus. Their view that as practitioners ofHinduism they know best is, I regret to say, indicative of the fact theyunderstand little the religion of which they claim to be authentic specimens.The genius of Hinduism resides precisely in the fact that it is a polycentric,extraordinarily diverse, and decentered faith, and there are more kinds ofHindus than one could conjure even in oneï'½s most fanciful moments. As a Hindu,I do not recognize many of their claims as valid. It is also a fact that, likeevery other religion known to us in the world, Hinduism has practiced its ownforms of discrimination, and I can say with certainty that the views of thosewho have been marginalized by upper-caste Hinduism do not correspond with theviews of many members of the Indian American community who have written to youand other state officials. To admit all of this is not in the least to deny thefact that there were egregious, even offensive, errors in the India units of thetextbooks, but the CRP did, of course, agree with many of the proposed edits. Myown work, and that of most scholars presently working on Indian history andreligion, is informed by the understanding that Hinduism and ancient Indianhistory were often grossly misrepresented in scholarly works in the past, butthe whole endeavor of the last three decades has been to avoid these kinds ofmistakes. In the present controversy, it would be highly misleading to suggest,as the Vedic Foundation and Hindu Education Foundation and their supporters havedone, that their opponents have a derogatory view of India or of Hinduism orthat their views are somehow intrinsically prejudiced. Nothing could be furtherfrom the truth.

Thirdly, it is important to stress the fact that the changesproposed by the Hindu Education Foundation and Vedic Foundation, and endorsed byProfessor Bajpai, were also sought to be introduced into history textbooks inIndia itself when the Bharatiya Janata Party, known for its outspoken advocacyof Hindu supremacy, came into political power and started working closely withavowedly Hindu supremacist organizations such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP)and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). These "debates" on Indian historytextbooks have gone through many rounds in India. The Hindu nationalists inIndia sought to introduce, indeed sometimes with success in certain states asGujarat, which has been governed by Hindu nationalists over the last severalyears, changes that can only be described as reprehensible. It is a welldocumented fact that, in the history school textbooks in Gujarat, Hitler isupheld as an example of a leader who was disciplined and valiantly lifted thecountry out of its torpor, just as these history books conveniently forget tomention the fact that Mahatma Gandhi, the greatest Indian of the day, wasassassinated by a Hindu nationalist. No one, needless to say, is suggesting thatthese are the changes sought by members of the Indian American community. But itis worthwhile remembering that the same history textbooks try to suggest tostudents that the caste system was never oppressive, that women in India wereendowed with equal rights as men, that Hinduism is inherently tolerant while theSemitic faiths are inherently intolerant, and that India is the origin of allthe great accomplishments in human civilization. These are precisely thechanges, among others, which the Hindu Education Foundation (HEF) and VedicFoundation (VF) are keen to implement. The textbooks created a scandal in India,besides introducing havoc into the educational system, and it is worthwhilepondering what the consequences might be of introducing ill-founded claims inhistory textbooks in California. I may add that I have treated this subject atconsiderable length in my book, The History of History: Politics andScholarship in Modern India (Oxford University Press, 2003), and I amprepared, if asked, to furnish you with as many citations as you might requireabout the nature of debates over history textbooks in India.

While it is not possible for me to dwell at any great lengthon the changes recommended by Prof. Bajpai and disputed by the CRP, it would beinstructive, I believe, to look briefly at three such changes, pertaining to therole of women in ancient India, the nature of the caste system, and the earlyhistory of Aryans in India. On the question of women, one of HEFï'½s proposededits, approved by Prof. Bajpai, would alter the passage in the Glencoe/McGrawHill textbook (p. 245), which presently reads as "Men had many more rightsthan women" to the following: "Men had different duties (dharma) as well asrights than women. Many women were among the sages to whom the Vedas wererevealed." The Upanishads mention not "many" women sages, but onlya couple -- indeed, only one whose name appears constantly, Gargi. Moreimportantly, all scholars of ancient Indian history are agreed that the positionof men and women in ancient Indian society was vastly unequal. The view ofsomeone such as D. N. Jha, a formidable authority on ancient India who hastaught at the University of Delhi for some decades, can reasonably be consideredas representative. Writing in his recent work, Early India (Delhi, 2004),Jha states of ancient India that "the Brahmanical thinkers defined the duty ofeach caste, and imposed social, economic, and political disabilities on theshudras; they also laid down injunctions undermining the position of women"(p. 92).

Characterizing women as having different (rather than fewer)rights than men cannot be viewed other than as a gross attempt to whitewash thehistory of patriarchy in ancient India. It is instructive that Mahatma Gandhi,who has often been criticized by secular and Marxist scholars in India as havinga romantic conception of ancient Indian civilization, wrote with sadness andcharacteristic bluntness the following in 1926: "What can women have done thateven men like Tulsidas [a renowned saint] have used insulting epithets for them?Whether it was the fault of Tulsidas or of the times, the blemish isnevertheless there." He adds, referring to an earlier period, "The ancientlaws were made by seers who were men. The womenï'½s experience, therefore, isnot represented in them." (Raghavan Iyer, ed., The Moral and PoliticalWritings of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford [1987], Vol. 3, pp. 393-94; emphasisadded) Should we then, following the logic of the HEF and the Vedic Foundation,view Gandhi as a self-hating Hindu hostile to his own religion and culture? Itwould, of course, be absurd to do so, but his views on this matter are preciselythose which the CRP and South Asian academics are supporting. Stressingdifference rather than inequality, as the HEF and Prof Bajpai propose, would berather like saying that African Americans and white Americans in Jim Crow Southhad different rights. We all know that "difference" here is only a way ofdisguising the brutal truth that white Americans exercised dominance overAfrican Americans in virtually every domain of life.

On the nature of the caste system in India, the editsproposed by the HEF and endorsed by Professor Bajpai, if accepted into thetextbooks, would convey to students the exceedingly erroneous impression thatcaste should simply be viewed as another form of social stratification, similarto class distinctions that have existed in every society known to human beings,when in fact the caste system - particularly if we understand it through thecategories of ï'½varnaï'½ and ï'½jatiï'½ - was, and is, distinct to the Indiansubcontinent. Much worse, the proposed edits seek to convey the idea, to whichstudents are alerted by the bland assertion of the fact that in modern India ï'½untouchabilityï'½is outlawed by the Constitution, that the caste system did not entail systematicforms of discrimination. All the evidence points to the contrary fact, namelythat the caste system condemned millions of people to permanent and relentlessservitude, and though legislation forbids such discrimination today, theposition of many Dalits remains substantially unaltered. The list of authoritieshere is long enough that it would take several pages, but for ancient India, onecould turn to the works of D. N. Jha, Romila Thapar, Uma Chakravarti, D. D.Kosambi, J. H. Hutton, B. R. Ambedkar, and P. V. Kane; for modern India, onecould turn to B. R. Ambedkar, Gail Omvedt, Kancha Ilaiah, Dipankar Gupta, AndreBeteille, among many others. It is astonishing that the word "Dalit", whichderives from the root "dal", meaning scattered, split, and broken up (thusreferring to people whose worldviews and experiences were scattered to the wind,people so abused that they could not remain whole) which is correctly used inone of the present textbooks to refer to the lowest strata of Indian society,should have been deleted by Professor Bajpai with the observation that only asmall strata of the lower castes in Maharashtra call themselves as such. Dalitis, in fact, the word with which the people formerly known as the "Untouchables",and now numbering something in the vicinity of 15-20% of Indiaï'½s population,prefer to designate themselves. If we cannot even do them the simple dignity ofallowing them to name themselves - and there is almost no greater power than thepower to name - how can we expect that we will do their history justice?

This brings me to the final point. At various places the HEFand Vedic Foundation have submitted that the narrative of Aryan migrations toIndia, which is about as established a fact as any that one can encounter in thehuman sciences, is erroneous. The Aryans came to India most likely from a placesomewhere in the vicinity of present-day Georgia and the Ural Mountains, morebroadly from Central Asia, and scholars, including Indians, Europeans,Americans, as well as those who are designated as ï'½liberalï'½, ï'½Marxistï'½,or ï'½positivistsï'½, all accept this as a fact which has been the foundation ofhuge amounts of scholarship in such areas as comparative religion, comparativeand Indo-European linguistics, mythology, and history. The scholars who are bestqualified to deliver an opinion on this matter are those who have devoted alifetime of study to this subject, who are conversant with at least a couple ofancient languages and skilled in reading ancient texts and inscriptions, and Ido not believe that the alleged evidence of some unknown geneticist, or thestrong sentiments of a community some of whose members would like to believethat Aryans left India for other parts of the world, should be viewed asconstituting evidence of the need to overturn the long established view on thismatter. If the Curriculum Commission and the State Board of Education findthemselves torn by the appeals of both sides, it would easy enough a matter toconsult specialists in Indo-European studies who are not Indianists byprofession and can therefore be viewed as impartial. I would be pleased tofurnish the names of some such specialists.

In conclusion, it is understandable that Indian Americans,and in particular the Hindus among them, should view themselves as concernedabout representations of their history and religion which they find to beinaccurate and offensive. No one, least of all members of the CRP or specialistsof South Asian studies who for years have been engaged in combating suchrepresentations in scholarly and popular books, journals, and the media, isdisputing the fact that history textbooks should reflect the history, cultureand religion of a people as accurately as possible, and with the culturalsensitivity to which every group is entitled. But that, we should be clear,is no longer the issue. To understand the present objectives of the HinduEducation Foundation and Vedic Foundation and their supporters in the community,it is necessary to recognize the fact that they are inspired by the similarHindu nationalist agenda which has gained a significant political voice in Indiasince the early 1990s and which has created severe disruptions in Indiaï'½seducational system. The history that such nationalists would impose uponstudents is invariably a sanitized one, cleansed of unpleasant facts aboutsystematic forms of discrimination and exploitation which are as much a part ofhuman history as the aspiration for freedom and liberation from oppression.Moreover, the achievements of Indian civilization are great enough that weshould not have to manufacture evidence and pretend that the Aryans originatedin India and showered the gift of civilization on all other peoples. Emboldenedby the economic rise of India, the growing awareness in the world of Indiaï'½spresent and past role in world history, and their own growing numbers in theUnited States as well their extraordinary affluence, some members of the IndianAmerican community are, we should recognize, seeking to push through changes intextbooks which no serious group of scholars of Indian history would view asanything other than palpable falsehoods.

This matter has now gone well beyond California, and peoplein the US, India, and wherever there are significant Indian communities will belooking to see how a resolution is achieved. I am afraid that Californiaï'½sschool system will, among such people, fall into considerable ill-repute if thechanges sought to be imposed by the Hindu Education Foundation and VedicFoundation are accepted by the State Board of Education. I very much hope thatthe State Board will not be swayed by the consideration that the demands, evenwhen wholly unreasonable, made by an ethnic and religious community should beacceded to merely because failure to do so will be viewed by some members ofthat community as injurious to their sentiments. In the last analysis, if thepurpose of the textbooks is to impart as accurate a view of the past as ispossible, and if we should wish to do our students justice and turn them intocitizens capable of reflecting about such matters as equality and inequality,justice and injustice, then it becomes imperative that the State Board ofEducation, the Curriculum Commission, and other bodies should only be guided byconsiderations of what constitutes a true body of knowledge.

I am available to answer any further queries you may have, tofurnish evidence on behalf of the arguments advanced in this letter and bymembers of the CRP, or to otherwise make myself available to you for furtherconsultation if you should so desire.