New Delhi: Recent changes to National Council for Education Research and Training’s history books for Class 12 students appear to cast doubts over the fact that Aryans immigrated into India, claiming that present-day Indians’ roots go back to the Harappan civilisation.
Indian Express has reported that these updates are for the academic year 2024-25, and were recently communicated to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE).
The report says that changes have been carried out in history and sociology textbooks for Classes 7, 8, 10, 11 and 12. Out of these the most significant ones are found in the chapter on the Harappan civilisation of the Class 12 textbook Themes in Indian History Part I.
The changes appear to claim that there is a 5,000-year-old “unbroken” line of Indian people. The NCERT has done this, the Express report says, on the basis of “recent archaeogenetic research conducted at the Rakhigarhi site.”
This DNA study rejects Aryan immigration, asserting a claim that Harappans are indigenous people whose line still continues. “The DNA of the Harappans has continued till today and a majority of the South Asian population appears to be their descendants,” the new text book says.
Later, the textbook doubles down on this claim and asks for more research on the relationship between Harappans and the Vedic people.
In 2019, two studies – one in Cell, the other in Science – upheld the Indo-Aryan migration theory, Scroll had reported. This theory has been increasingly challenged by a Hindutva line of thinking that upholds a claim that Harappans were Vedic people and that immigrant Aryans are not predecessors of present-day Indians.
It also suggests that the Harappans practised some form of democratic system.
Facts in the earlier books on a break between the Early Harappan and the later Harappan civilisation have been deleted.
A mention of ‘Hindu’ from the Class 6 textbook of history that says that Birsa Munda opposed missionaries and Hindu landlords has been removed with the claim that landlords of the time were from diverse backgrounds.
A mention of caste backgrounds has been changed to ‘social backgrounds’ in a Class 7 textbook passage on Nayanars, devotees of Shiv.
In the Class 12 sociology book, a section on Adivasi struggles now no longer has the claim that SCs and STs are marked by poverty, powerlessness and social stigma.
An image of communal riots in a book of the same class has been dropped with the claim that it is “not relevant in the present time.”
