S.N. Sahu 
Greetings and good wishes being conveyed to teachers on the occasion of celebrations of teacher’s day, marking the birth anniversary of former President of India S. Radhakrishnan on September 5, constitutes a defining feature of our nation.
This year Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge’s appeal to teachers on the eve of Teacher’s Day to caution students about the distortion of history by the Modi regime stands out in defence of the idea of India. He proceeded to add in his appeal that the teachers should, as much as possible, transmit to the students through the curriculum the enduring ideals enshrined in the constitution and its preamble.
Kharge’s appeal brings to mind Mahatma Gandhi’s warnings during partition of our country that accentuation of communal disharmony would poison the history syllabus. Mahatma Gandhi published his article “Of New Universities,” in Harijan on November 2, 1947 and wrote with rare farsightedness that deepening of Hindu-Muslim conflict, apart from causing havoc to society and solidarity of people pursuing diverse faiths would make education and history very toxic and ruin young minds.
He referred to the worsening Hindu-Muslim relations and remarked with deep pathos, “The poison has assumed such dangerous proportions that it is difficult to forecast where it will land us.” He then outlined a worrying scenario and wrote, “Assume that the unthinkable has happened and that not a single Muslim can remain in the Union safely and honourably, and that neither Hindu nor Sikh can do likewise in Pakistan.”
He went on to predict: “Our education will then wear a poisonous form” and if, “on the other hand, Hindus, Muslims, and all the others belonging to different faiths could live in either Dominion with perfect safety and honour, then in the nature of things, our education would take a shape altogether pleasing.”
He stated that the beautiful blend of cultures produced by people of different faiths if ever got annihilated by communalism then “…we shall cast about for the day when there was only one religion represented in Hindustan and retrace our steps to that exclusive culture.” “It is just possible,” he remarked, “that we might not be able to find any such historical date, and if we do, and we retrace our steps, we shall throw our culture back to that ugly period and deservedly earn the execration of the universe.”
Gandhi cautioned, “…if we make the vain attempt of obliterating the Muslim period, we shall have to forget that there was a mighty Jama Masjid in Delhi, second to none in the world, or that there was a Muslim University in Aligarh, or that there was the Taj in Agra, one of the seven wonders of the world, or that there were the great forts of Delhi and Agra built during the Mughal period.” He was pained to observe that such a process of deletion of the Mughal period from history would result in rewriting our history.
Sadly what he wrote came true when NCERT removed several important chapters of Mughal period from history textbooks for school children and replaced the chapter on Indus valley civilisation by twisting it as ‘Saraswati’ culture.
That warning of Gandhi is resonating in the appeal issued by Kharge on the eve of 2024 Teacher’s Day that students should be cautioned by their teachers about the misrepresentation of history, to salvage the idea of India.
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While addressing a prayer meeting in Delhi on June 9, 1947, almost two months before independence, Gandhi referred to a letter he received from Jayachandra Vidyalankar who pointed out that the cause of Hindu-Muslim animosity could be traced to faulty writing of history and so, he requested Gandhi to see to it that the teaching of history was imparted in the right spirit without which all attempts to bring about Hindu-Muslim unity would fail.
He, by way of instance, informed Gandhi that Maharana Kumbha, grandfather of Rana Sangha erected a victory pillar at Chittor after defeating Muslim rulers in Gujarat and Malwa and in that pillar he inscribed the name of Allah next to the images of Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh. Flagging the examples of Maharana Ranjit Singh and Chhatrapati Shivaji who respected Islam he asked Gandhi “Why do these champions of Hinduism who resent the recitation from the Koran at your prayers not object to Allah’s name inscribed on this victory pillar?”
Kharge’s appeal to teachers assumes added significance in the context of those profound thoughts articulated by Gandhi at the time of our independence. Those thoughts need to be shared by teachers with students to justify their worthy roles as educators and nation builders to save our country from the gathering crisis of toxic communalism.
S.N. Sahu served as an officer on special duty to former President KR Narayanan.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.