New Delhi: Even as a number of school text books are in the process of revision, with multiple debatable additions and deletions, the National Council of Educational Research and Training has now released a new social science text book for Class 6 that unapologetically perpetuates historical myths espoused by the Hindu Right.
The new Class 6 social science text book Exploring Society: India and Beyond that replaces three separate text books of introductory history, political science, and geography has referred to the Indus Valley Civilisation or the Harappan Civilisation (known as the Sindhu Ghaati Sabhyata in Hindi) as the “Indus-Sarasvati” civilisation and “Sindhu-Sarasvati civilisation, foregrounding the Hindu Right’s contention that the desiccation of the mythical Sarasvati river led to the decline of the Harappan civilisation.
For many years now, the Hindu Right has used Sarasvati river’s reference in the Rig Veda as a proof to establish its larger hypothesis that Aryans did not migrate to India but were indigenous inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. The reference has been used to underline the notion that Aryans existed in India even before they authored the Vedas. However, professional historians have dismissed the claim as even the late Harappan phase, when the civilisation was in a state of decline, existed anywhere between 200-500 years years before the Rig Veda is supposed to have been written. However, the Hindu Right has insisted on establishing overlaps in the Harappan and Vedic ages, in order to dismiss any possibility of Aryan migration into India.
The Sarasvati river mentioned in Rig Veda has thus remained an important tool in the Hindu Right’s hands to lay claim to its political thesis that the Hindu civilisation is the “original” culture of the subcontinent, which was destroyed by alleged Islamic marauders, and that Hindus have the first right on all Indian resources.
Also read: Saraswati: The River That Never Was, Flowing Always in the People’s Hearts
The politicisation of children will now begin from Class 6, when the NCERT book will teach them unproven facts.
The Indian Express reported that the book says that “the ‘Sarasvati’ basin included major cities of the civilisation – Rakhigarhi and Ganweriwala – along with smaller cities and towns” and that the rivers Ghaggar in India and Hakra in Pakistan made up the now-vanished Sarasvati’s river valley. The new book has also published a “map” of the mythical river valley to back its claim.
The book glosses offer problems with such an assertion. For instance, the Rig Veda describes Sarasvati as a powerful perennial river which could erode even chunks of mountains. However, the new Class 6 books says that the Sarasvati river dried up at some stage to become a seasonal river, which is now called as Ghaggar.
The old history text book for Class 6 was written by professional historians and fleetingly mentioned Sarasvati as part of the rivers named in the Rig Vedic hymns. But the new social science textbook has prominently discussed Sarasvati. It says that the drying up of the river played a key role in the decline of the Harappan civilisation, leading to people migrating out of the vibrant urban settlements like Kalibangan and Banawali.
The old textbook had dealt with the decline of the Indus valley civilisation historically, where multiple reasons from desiccation of different river basins, deforestation, flooding of cities were explored as possible factors. “But none of these reasons can explain the end of all the cities. Flooding, or a river drying up, would have had an effect in only some areas. It appears as if the rulers lost control,” the old book said.
The Sarasvati ‘project’
A few years ago, the BJP-led Haryana government had undertaken a massive exercise to claim that the mythical Sarasvati river originated in Adi Badri, a small village in Yamunanagar district of the state. A small seasonal stream that flew into Som river was declared as the origin of Sarasvati in a temple in Adi Badri.
Also read: How the Indian Govt Is Pushing Money Down a Mythological River
Speaking with The Wire, Professor M.S. Jaglan, who recently retired from the geography department of Kurukshetra University and has researched in the area, said that there is no scientific evidence through which one can claim that the Sarasvati river existed in Adi Badri.
“First, no paleo-channels (river basins which may have vanished through time) could be found in Adi Badri. Secondly, the stream that has been declared as the mighty Himalayan Sarasvati river flows eastwards while the mythical Sarasvati was supposed to flow towards the West, even if we assume that the river may have become seasonal owing to tectonic movements. Thirdly, the areas of Yamunanagar and Ambala have multiple ‘subterranean flows’ that throw up ground water even with minor digging.”
As far as Sarasvati’s link to Ghaggar is concerned, Jaglan said, “Ghaggar’s origin is somewhere near Panchkula in Haryana and is a seasonal river. The Adi Badri stream flows into Som river, which originates in Himachal Pradesh. The Sarasvati could have existed but we haven’t found any concrete geographical evidence to establish that as yet.”
He said that myths are culturally significant but can’t be passed off as scientific facts. “If Sarasvati existed in Haryana and was part of the Indus Valley, then how do people claim that the Sangam in Prayagraj is the spot where Ganga, Yamuna and Sarasvati converged?” he asked.
‘Ujjayini meridian’, no mention of ‘Dalit’, and other plans
Speaking with the Indian Express, NCERT sources said, “The entire content, illustrations and maps of the present textbook is based on the new syllabus developed as a follow-up of NCF-SE [National Curriculum Framework for School Education] 2023. Therefore, the question of comparison between the content of old and new textbooks does not arise.”
The National Education Policy (NEP), too, has called for the “accurate inclusion of traditional Indian knowledge including tribal and other local knowledge into the curriculum, across humanities, sciences, arts, crafts and sports, whenever relevant”, which the new textbook claims to follow.
The new book will have five “interdisciplinary” themes: ‘India and the World: Land and the People’; ‘Tapestry of the Past’; ‘Our Cultural Heritage and Knowledge Traditions’; ‘Governance and Democracy’; ‘Economic Life Around Us’.
Apart from this, the new book also claims that India had a “prime meridian of its own”’ called the “Ujjayini meridian”, in an apparent attempt to cement the glory of early India and possibly a poor effort to write a “decolonial” history that accepts Greenwich in England as the standard prime meridian. It claims that many “centuries” before Europe, India had the Ujjayini meridian that became “a reference for calculations in all Indian astronomical texts”.
The geography section on mountains and landscapes contains Kalidasa’s reference to the Himalayas in his Kumarasambhava and also invokes Tamil Sangam literature to speak about landscapes.
The references to caste-based discrimination and inequality in the old political science textbook has also been deleted in the new social science book.
The Indian Express reported that the explanation of the term “Dalit”, a section on B. R. Ambedkar, and his struggles against caste exploitation has been done away with, and instead focuses on “diversity in terms of food, textiles, clothing, festivals and literature in the country”.
The word “caste” finds only a single mention in chapter 7 only in a quote by sociologist André Béteille which reads thus:
“The thousands of castes and tribes on the Indian subcontinent have influenced each other in their religious beliefs and practices since the beginning of history and before.”
“New textbooks are necessarily very different from the old ones as mandated by the NEP 2020, which calls for profound changes in the way new syllabi, teaching materials (including textbooks) and pedagogical methods need to be designed. The NCF-SE 2023 further defines and refines the parameters for this systemic change. The new textbooks attempt to reflect this change; therefore, comparing them with the old textbooks is pointless,” NCERT sources told the daily.
On why the NCERT decided to have only a single textbook for social science instead of introducing Class 6 students to history, political science and geography, sources said, “Firstly, to make the study of Social Science lighter for the student. Secondly, to make perceptible the integration of what was earlier considered as separate disciplines. The textbook does not follow the conventional disciplines of Geography, History, Political Science, and Economics – that approach will be introduced in the Secondary Stage, while in the Middle Stage, we follow a thematic approach.”
“Thus, the new textbook is organised around five themes which are, to some extent, interconnected in the spirit of multi-disciplinarity mandated by the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and the National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF-SE) 2023. Therefore, it made sense to keep them in a single volume, which, incidentally, is much more compact than the earlier four separate textbooks,” they said.
