Romila thapar biography books for upsc
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But let me give a brief answer instead. (this is a battle, a battle for freedom)”. Should we go back to asking how we defeated colonialism and learn from that? The current deletions were done by a few people unconnected with the initial writing of the textbooks. It is the writing of qualified professional historians. These deletions have created an imbalance which has lowered the quality of the history presented.
Their content is discussed in detail.
This would have reduced the burden on children more effectively than just hacking off sections without a proper explanation.
Scholarship — be it of foreigners studying India or of scholarship critical of India — has become a contentious issue today. Of course we know that it is not social media that determines the historical narrative in history textbooks.
Deletions in accordance with the political ideology of those in authority, rather than the academic quality of the subject being taught, is the only unspoken explanation for this action by the NCERT. There is no precedent for throwing out passages, pages and chapters from prescribed textbooks, and doing so quite arbitrarily, as is claimed.
Their persistence, however, and the space they occupy, is a comment on the kind of society we have become.
In a society where intellectuals and academics are called ‘anti-nationals’, ‘pseudo-secularists’, ‘academic terrorists’ and worse, such name-calling of otherwise accepted people is a sign that society is suffering from ill health.
What remains for the school-going child to learn is a narrow sliver of irrelevant
information. The first kind of nationalism need not interfere with the tradition of debate in a society, unless it is deliberately used as a form of silencing others — and we know that it has been so used. In previous times, if any changes were to be made, they were generally marginal.
We have to return to being a society that works with at least some ethical norms.
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Over the last decade, there has been a pushback against the idea of Nehruvian India. No one seems to object to trolls pouring out abuse, some of it quite disgusting, on targeted persons. How do you look back upon it now?
Independence meant that we were celebrating not just the overthrowing of colonial rule but even more, the establishing of a nation or a nation-state of free citizens with rights: a democratic, secular nation-state.
If deletions have to be made, these have to be considered very carefully by a panel of experts. What is contentious is the attempt to cut scholarship in order to support a particular ideology, namely the conversion of a democratic secular India into a Hindu Rashtra. But today, sadly enough, another song that was sung decades later, and for different reasons, has touched a different sentiment.
Some academic
journals still carry dissenting views and these are as yet beyond the purview of political control and, hopefully, will remain so.
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At the level of school teaching, knowledge in many subjects is being selectively deleted from teaching for ideological reasons, for example, the deletion of the theory of evolution and the periodic table.