Full Text | ‘We Don’t Know What Has Been Omitted in NCERT Books. So It’s Also Being Done Secretly'

Mridula Mukherjee, a well-known historian professor, who taught in JNU for four decades, recently spoke to Sidharth Bhatia for ‘The Wire Talks’ podcast on the impact of the NCERT removing portions relating to the Mughals and much more from high school textbooks. She points out the changes are very shoddily done – even the Industrial Revolution has been removed.

Below is the full text of the interview. Listen to the podcast here.

Hello and welcome to ‘The Wire Talks’. I am Sidharth Bhatia. History is always written by the victor, it is said, but aren’t some facts of history uncontestable. Indian historical knowledge has been the product of painstaking research by experts over decades. Post independence Indian textbooks began reflecting history that gave the Indian and not the colonial point of view and these have been taught to school children and to undergraduates for a very very long time.

The news, therefore, that the National Council of Educational Research and Training or NCERT which advises the government on school education has made several important cuts to the high school textbooks in history, political science, and perhaps other disciplines has sent shockwaves among academics and educationists.

Mass portions about the Mughals have been taken out as references to the RSS being banned after Mahatma Gandhi‘s assassination. Now there will be no mention of Maulana Azad anymore. Leading historians have protested vocally and the Indian History Congress, which is over 90 years old, has called it “alarming”.

Why do these changes matter? To understand this we reached out to the well-known historian professor Mridula Mukherjee.

Professor Mukherjee has taught at the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, for over four decades. She has held many important posts such as the director of Nehru Memorial Museum and library and dean of School of Social Sciences, JNU. She has been a visiting professor in institutions in Italy, France, Brazil, the US and Japan. She has written several books on India’s independence and after, and she has co-authored an interesting book which completely is in line with what we are going to discuss today, on RSS school textbooks and the murder of Mahatma Gandhi, the Hindu communal project. As is obvious she is the right person to be discussing this issue with us today.

Professor Mridula Mukherjee, welcome to ‘The Wire Talks’.

Mridula: Thank you!

Sidharth: Mridula ji, why do you think NCERT has changed these history books now? Secondly, it is an autonomous body and has no obligation to go with the government line, so why do you think this is happening?

Mridula: Well in theory, yes to the answer to the second part of your question. In theory they are an independent body and they don’t have to go with what the government says, but as you know what is happening in all our institutions. One, the government takes great care to appoint people with whom they are comfortable politically and who will heed their advice and this is one such case where clearly that’s happening.

The answer to the first part of your question is why now. Well, it’s actually not now, this has been in the process. They made some changes earlier in 2017, then they have been making changes in the syllabus at various levels, including at the undergraduate level. The Delhi University syllabus or the university syllabus [that] UGC brought out a couple of years back, lots of changes have been suggested in that.

Then a parliamentary committee actually went into the whole thing and gave all kinds of recommendations based on a report by a think-tank that is headed by a well-known political person. So you know at various levels the preparations for this [change in the syllabus of textbooks] had been going on. Protests have also happened but somehow this time it has caught the media’s attention and the protests are happening at a much wider level.

Earlier bodies like the Indian History Congress, groups of people here and there, we had all gone on making our noises but with little effect. People even went and gave evidence before the parliamentary committee but as you know nothing really matters once this government and the political regime makes up its mind about something. They are very sure they know the truth, so they go ahead and give it to you whether you like it or not.

So this is all part of a process which earlier the NDA government had also done. They had thrown out a whole generation of textbooks in 1999 written by R.S. Sharma, Romila Thapar, Vipin Chandra and Satish Chandra. They threw them out successfully. They had substituted books written by people who belonged to their line of thinking. [These] books were very substandard as well; they had lots of errors. All this was pointed out by the Indian History Congress and other historians.

So when the UPA government came to power those books were removed. And a fresh lot of books which are now being tampered with were written in the period after 2004, roughly from, I would say, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, because it takes time to write new books. So, it was their books which were written by a very large number of people who came together.

In fact, one of the points that needs to be mentioned about the current books which are being tampered with now is that a very broad base committee of 10-15 people was set up in each discipline and each book for each class was also written by a group of scholars, most of the time. So this whole thing about these books being written by people who all “leftist”, “marxist”, “anti-nationals”, whatever you’d like to call them, “tukde-tukde gang”, and that’s why we need to change them, which is the noise we are hearing all the time, this doesn’t even conform to the facts of the case.

I had not heard in any of the TV debates or comments, in the last week or so, a single name of an author being mentioned. [This is] because they don’t know who they are. Even when they now mention [the name of an] author, they mention the authors of the books which were removed more than 20 years ago. Because there is a lot of shadow-boxing going on here, because those were important, well-known names; you could attribute a particular way of thinking to them. Wrongly, but you could.

So the whole debate is also going on with all these camouflages of various kinds. Of course the NCERT director pleads total innocence and says that ‘oh it’s a committee of experts which has gone into weight and we have oddly done it to relieve the burden, because of COVID-19 which the children are suffering from’.

Sidharth: So fundamentally two things are operating here: one is prejudice and the second is a push towards a particular point of view which now conforms with the government in place and more importantly, the larger ecosystem behind the government in place and all that.

I am asking a simplistic question here but I would like to ask your views anyway. Why have textbooks become such a battlefield?

Mridula: 

Textbooks have not become [a battlefield] now, they have been a battlefield.

Sidharth: Why so?

Mridula: Because…the ecosystem as you called them. To put a name on it. The RSS, BJP, the way of thinking, they are very clear in one thing: that you need to catch people young.

I want to remind you that after Independence, the RSS was banned and they were in jail for one and half years. After the ban was removed and they came back into public life, one of the first things they started was setting up of schools, not colleges. We now know them as Saraswati Shishu Mandir. That is one name that is most commonly used for them. And now there are thousands of such schools, somewhere in the range of 15,000 to 20,000, if not more.

They started out with a few [schools] but over the years, and when they had state power, they used that to expand themselves.

The second thing, which is part of their core activity, is the shakhas, the morning shakhas. Now what happens in the morning sakhas: you catch children who are very young. Your parents get attracted because there’s physical activity, exercise, etc. happening. So the children are attracted because of that and then they use the shakhas for your political ideological propaganda. That’s how the swayamsewaks usually emerge.

One thing you have to recognise is that this regime, this ecosystem, is very ideological, and they are committed to their ideology and they are very clear about their ideology. And there has been no change in their ideology from the time the RSS was founded, the Hindu Mahasabha became an experienced organisation under Savarkar. So from 1925, when the RSS was founded and from the mid 30s when Savarkar took over the Hindu Mahasabha, which earlier was more of a moderate kind of an organisation, their ideological project has been very clear, and whenever they get an opportunity or even don’t get an opportunity, they push that project, because they have a clear cut picture of the kind of India they want.

It’s not a futuristic India, as I love to say. Actually, they have no vision for the future. They want to go to the past. So going back to the vedas or the pure kind of Hindu land or whatever it might be, now of course they add on development and all that in order to get votes.

But the core of the ideology is ‘Hindu Rashtra’.

And this Hindu Rastra is defined in various kinds of ways where Hindus are the dominant community and other communities with whom they are forced to live are the communities, if they survive, they should become second-class. It’s a very clear picture, and of course, what would be the position of women in it? What should be the kind of education that should be there which should tell us about our ancient heroes, which should make us forget about the Mughal powers except as oppressors and tormentors, people who converted and spoiled our women and the whole Islamophobia, it’s a very clear picture at the back of these exercise.

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Sidharth: Yeah, so exactly that’s was what brings me neatly to what I was going to ask: generations of students have grown up reading about the Mughals. The same people do know that the RSS was banned after Gandhiji‘s assassination. There are newspaper headlines and so much more. That has gone and now comes the news that all mentions of Maulana Azad have been taken out. So how does this fit in with this vision that you spoke about?

Mridula: Because these are all uncomfortable facts, which disturbed that vision, and therefore, they should not remain in the public domain.  They don’t care about people like you or others who may have an opportunity to read outside for exposure. They are aiming for the common student who most likely will not pick up a book of history after school. They will learn history only in class 10 anyway. Only [those students who choose] the more specialised [subject], those who pick up history as a subject in class 11 and 12, will even know a little more history at that point. But basically they want an average student, an ordinary student, to go through the school system without any exposure or awareness of this – the real history of India. It should go without knowing about Indian diversity, our linguistic diversity, our caste diversity, our religious diversity.

They should go through without learning about caste exploitation. Mind you, they are very very conscious about excluding references to caste exploitation. There is discomfort because it disturbs the notion of an ideal Hindu past. This ideal Hindu past had ‘untouchability’ as a differential element, inequality as a differential elements, it’s not such a glorious past. Anything which questions the notion of the glorious Hindu ancient past is a taboo. So similarly, Gandhiji’s assassination story is a very powerful story. After all, perhaps after Buddha, as Nehru said, the greatest Indian that we are likely to produce in a long time fell to these communal forces. Any child in India who gets [even] ordinary education will ask a question.

Isn’t there something to worry about the kind of political ideology which leads to the elimination of a ban such as Mahatma Gandhi, whom we still call the father of the nation? So these are uncomfortable facts, which have to be somehow kept away, in the hope the child will ultimately never come across them or by the time the child comes [to know these facts], he’ll be ideologically so oriented that he’ll ignore or deny these facts and not take them seriously.

The WhatsApp university would have whitewashed his brain even more by then. And he will begin to believe that Jawaharlal Nehru was a Muslim, born of a mother who was…and all that. All the stories which are going around, people will start believing them as well.

Sidharth: So to put a kind of a spin of it, you have to keep the parts to say that the Mughals were actually very cruel to Hindus, and etc. Keep those parts but remove anything else which talks about Din-a-Elahi or Akbar or that kind of thing.

Mridula: Yeah, you even remove references to the fact that Rana Pratap was defeated. I mean, [you can change] all the history to the extent that victory turns into defeat and defeat into victory.

You can declare a man called Hemu, whom you know I might have read sometime in school but I’ve very clearly forgotten him, as the last Hindu emperor, but when I went and checked somewhere he was emperor for 15 days or something in between that he declared himself. And this is the kind of absurdity that we come across, but one thing I want to point out before I forget is, the Maulana Azad story, for example, which has only come out now.

Yesterday, for the first time, the Hindu reported that how they even removed the reference which only mentions his name as one of the people who used to chair the committee in the constituent assembly. Even that much is not permissible that a Muslim name can be mentioned as one of the five names that were mentioned as somebody who used to chair committees. I mean that is the level of paranoia.

So some curious student may ask who Maulana Azad was. He may actually look it up and find out that he was a very nice man. And that he doesn’t fit into the picture of a cruel oppressor and that he was a very educated man.

Even Nehru used to say he was the fount of knowledge and wisdom. You may find out a little more. What is disturbing is that we actually don’t know till now what has been omitted. The research by journalists who showed us the list [of deleted passages/chapters] which was put out last year, [and] which was implemented this year, as Ritika of the Indian Express showed to us. There are actually more deletions than what is mentioned in the list. So it’s also being done secretly.

When the NCERT director was confronted with this, he said there may be some slip of the tongue… There may be some slips here and there. If there was one line removed, they may have forgotten to mention it. Like obviously. Frankly, we don’t know. Unless we do a line by line comparison between the old books and the new books, which is going to take time, but we need to do, we won’t even know what has been omitted. So we are only talking about the more obvious ones which have been brought to attention.

Sidharth: Has this been done by the NCERT director by fiat, or are there still those committees? And I read somewhere that one of the committee members said that we have no idea what was going on. How has it happened? What was the process?

Mridula: Though he was asked to mention some names of the committee members, he refused to do so on television saying that professional ethics prevented him from doing so, as if being a member of a committee of NCERT was a state secret.

I mean, why should an expert not want to be known as somebody who was on a committee? So, we actually don’t know whether there were credible people on the committee. Did they actually recommend [what we know as] the minutes of the committee? Who knows? These are all stories put out by the NCERT, and given the track record in how truthful they have been, they are claiming certain deletions. And, actually, we have found out that there were much more [deletions].

Sidharth: One of the complaints you talked about earlier [was when] you talked about all these leftist historians who came up with history and it’s time to correct the balance, etc. One of the browses, which has been aired a lot, has been that there’s too much emphasis on the Mughals, and not enough emphasis on, for example, the Cholas, and especially maybe not even on others who happen to be Hindus. Now, if that is so, is this an attempt to redress that balance or is this a completely fake kind of shadow man that has been created?

Mridula: So firstly, I would like to know how by deleting a chapter on the Mughals, deleting passages on Mahatma Gandhi, removing Maulana Azad’s name, removing the reference to the fact that Kashmir joined India on the basis of a certain condition about autonomy, and so many others, redress the balance? How does it mean bringing in the Cholas?

You are only making deletions. You are not adding anything. So that argument stands refuted on that ground only. Now we can come to the substance of the criticism, which is, is it true that these books or these writers have been Mughal-centric and not talked enough about the others and this and that? Firstly, I believe it’s not true. Neither in these textbooks nor otherwise, the kind of history that we have been writing the generations before us, our generation, the generations after that.

I think there has been a tremendous broadening of what constituted Indian research in new Indian history and writing on Indian history. And there is enough material available on the Cholas, Chankayas, Pandavas. Traditional histories [have] also paid a lot of attention to South India, to the great Cholas and all that. We all read about it in school, in college. I remember [while studying] ancient India in my college, that is more than 50-55 years ago or maybe more, we read extensively about all these things. And it is also not true that these books have been narrowly focusing on [these subjects]. In fact, the way the syllabus is designed in the NCERT CBSE syllabus, which is supported by the NCERT books, in class 6, they begin at a very simple level to read about ancient India.

So there’s a whole year spent on ancient India. In class 7 they do medieval period, in class 8 they do modern India, and the level of complexity goes on increasing as their age goes on increasing. Then in class 9 and 10, earlier it was supposed to be world history, today, there’s a slightly different orientation of that, but essentially history of other countries other than India, so that by the time you finish your compulsory till class 10, the student has a fair idea of Indian history as well as of important events that have happened in the world. I also want to tell you that they have dropped the chapter on the Industrial Revolution from the course. Imagine [this is] one of the most important events.

What has it got to do with the Cholas, Chalukyas or Mughals, nothing, but should I say [this is] the level of incompetence and sometimes of just thoughtlessness, do you want children to go through the course without knowing about the Industrial Revolution? It’s so fundamental.

Still today, [we are experiencing] the consequences of that. [In fact,] we are a product of that, all of us, and they have dropped the full chapter on the Industrial Revolution. Which expert committee would do this? I would really like to know.

Sidharth: It’s possible. This is just conjecture, but it’s possible that the Industrial Revolution would be taken out by adding the notion that all these things had already been invented here in this way.

Mridula: Yeah, . That’s right. Oh, you are right. That could be, yeah, I didn’t think of it because yes, you’re right, that maybe, that giving Industrial Revolution means giving credit to the West.

Sidharth: Yes, yes. I’m curious, have we heard about the colonial raj in this country being taken out?

Mridula: No, it’s all there.

Sidharth: That’s curious, isn’t it?

Mridula: Yes, it is. It is. Yes. So that’s why I said that the pattern of deletion is the giveaway. It’s the real giveaway, but I never thought of the expedition for the Industrial Revolution. Thanks for pointing that out. I’m quite sure that something like that might well be, because how do you then talk about aeroplanes in ancient India and plastic surgery and all that, if you know it’s actually with the Industrial Revolution that all these changes to modernity began to happen.

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Sidharth: And what, again, one of the criticisms, and I just heard some, you know, there are a lot of these pop-up historians that are emerging from…

Mridula: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sidharth: …the establishment. And one of them said, oh, the Mughals were outsiders. They kept on trying to go back, but the roads were blocked or something like that. But one of the grouses has been that there’s a lot of emphasis on certain nationalists, mainly those associated with the Congress, and because the Indian National Congress was a leading organisation and not enough on nationalist. and this in quotes, “nationalist, other nationalist heroes,” and we are going to try and insert those themes of those nationalist heroes. I don’t know which names these are, but again, I ask you as a historian, as somebody who knows what is taught, is this generally a legitimate allegation?

Mridula: No, I don’t believe so. Firstly, let me tell you that these new generation of textbooks that were written about, let’s say now, let’s say about 10 to 12 years ago, the ones we are talking about, in these [books] the emphasis on political history is much less, the focus shifted a lot to social history and history, cultural and other aspects. But even going to the specific point which you are raising, I think number one, obviously in any history of the freedom struggle, the Congress will occupy the primary place. Mahatma Gandhi will have to be talked about as the foremost leader of the freedom struggle, along with Sardar Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru and Maulana Azad and C. Rajagopalachari, Dadabhai Naoroji and all of them. But it is not true that, for example, the contribution of the revolutionaries has not been talked about.

It is not true. That Subhas Chandra Bose is not talked about, these are all, I would say, wrong allegations, and are meant to justify a certain point of view and to make people believe that it has been Congress-centric and Gandhi-centric, or even Nehru-centric.

I think I have been making this point repeatedly that when you make these allegations, wild allegations, you must quote a chapter and burst and prove your points because all the time this is said, whereas it is not true. We wrote a book, five of us [Bipan Chandra, Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee, Sucheta Mahajan, and K.N. Panikkar], I think now 30-40 years ago, which became quite well-known. It was called India’s Struggle for Independence. Bipan Chandra was the lead author, and there were four of us.

And if you just look at that book, which came out in 1988 for the first time, we talked about peasant rebellions, anti-caste movements, the revolutionaries, the left, the socialists. We talked about Subhas Chandra Bose. We talked about the UP kisan sabha movement. We talked about almost every possible story that could be there, from Dadabhai Naoroji to the left to the right.

Of course, we also talked about what we call the communalist, which they call nationalists. They’re very much there, but they’re there in what they actually did, which is promote communalism. There’s Muslim league, there’s Jinnah, there’s everyone as examples of not the nationalist movement, but those who followed a communal approach and who actually then led to the division of India.

So British policies is talked about, the partition is talked about, so it’s not just not true that even textbooks, which maybe not NCERT textbooks, but other books, which have been there in the market, and which billions of students have by now studied, [have been written with a] narrow approach to the writing of history. You just have to look at the list of the chapters to see that what I’m saying is absolutely true.

Sidharth: Among the many books you wrote, there was one called RSS, School Texts and the Murder of Mahatma Gandhi. And did it predict all this? Was it kind of conjecture?

Mridula: Well, it documented the first phase of the attempt to do away with the existing textbooks and put the others in place. So one part of that book actually came out of that concern with what was happening in the period 1990 to 2004. We started writing this soon after that, and we documented the kind of entire history of this interference and what kind of changes were made, etc.

And then we did two things: we had a whole section on the Gandhi assassination, the whole story of the assassination, showing the links with the wider political forces that were involved in this [event]. And the thing is, that entire book is based on quoting primary sources, from letters of Sardar [Vallabhbhai Patel] to Jawaharlal Nehru’s letters to the chief ministers, the inquiry committee report on the conspiracy to murder Mahatma Gandhi, which was done by Justice [Jeevan Lal Kapur] in 1965-70. This finally [established] the link between Savarkar and the conspiracy, etc.

And then there was a section in it in which we talked about the basic foundational ideology of Hindutva, beginning with Savarkar going on to Golwalkar and the speeches and resolutions of the Hindu mahasabha of the RSS. It showed the connection between the ideology, the murder, and the attempts to change the text.

So, basically, this book was an attempt to show how dangerous the ideology is. It can lead to a heinous event like the murder of Mahatma Gandhi, and it can also result in the messing with the future of our children. So that’s what it talked about.

Sidharth: As I said, it’s just coming true…

Mridula: Yes.

Siddharth: So your predictions, as it were, are all coming true because this is now at a much more intense level than what’s beginning to happen.

You were talking about another India government, but this has been turbocharged in a sense, and it’s moving ahead. Full speed. I read that the statement of the Indian History Congress is pretty strong. They have called it alarming, and they have said this is prejudiced and ignorant, and you said that the outcry this time is much more because the press has given it quite a lot of exposure.

Mridula: Outcry compared to the last three, four years?

Sidharth: Yes. But there is an outcry. The media is taking note of it, and it all adds up. Now, how do you think this is going to play out in the sense that will all this, where the NCERT director is clearly not being able to answer questions, credibly. How do you think this is going to play out? Are they going to backtrack or are they going to adjust, or are they going to invite suggestions? How do you think this is going ahead?

Mridula: I doubt very much that they will respond to the very widespread criticism that’s happening. And, there’s a lot of comment also in the international press on this, which has come quite rapidly, in fact, in the last few days. So the press in India and also the civil society, and historians, of course, are very concerned about this. Given the determination with which they are going ahead, and in all other spheres where we see there is no give, there’s genuine desire to look at criticism and see if there’s any value in it.

It’s like there’s a preordained thing which has been decided, and [we are] going ahead with it. We have been seeing it in universities over the last few years, since 2016, for example. The vice chancellors who get appointed, they just have an agenda and they go ahead with it regardless. You can go on criticising, in JNU, the administration lost some 200 cases, which were filed by faculty and students against them. It hasn’t stopped them from doing exactly what they want to do.

Because I think the instructions are probably very clear. And that’s why I was pointing out that they are doing this not only in NCERT, the undergraduate syllabus is being messed with. In UP, for example, they have already accepted the UGC syllabus, which was pointed out by the Indian History Congress earlier. And [this was raised] in the parliamentary committees also. The Indian History Congress resolution, if you read the one which you mentioned just now, they pointed out how these attempts have been made successfully, where the Mughals have again been dropped. In fact, that syllabus, if you look at it, is so illiterate. Anybody should be ashamed to have their name associated with it.

[Recalling] the UGC history syllabus for undergraduates – I think it was on contemporary India, where more than half of the books that were suggested had nothing to do with the subject. They had been picked up from anywhere and everywhere and just put over there. And all this has been pointed out in writing. But did they have any effect? No.

I know that in UP, the new syllabus has already been implemented and publishers are bringing out books with the altered syllabus. This has been happening since last year. See, most of the time, we don’t even know what’s happening. And that is what is frightening. They are quietly borrowing their way everywhere and going on. It’s only once in a while somebody takes it up and then for some reason it’s caught on.

Maybe because there’s some change in the atmosphere, there’s a little more openness, maybe [because] the opposition is getting together or whatever it is, Rahul Gandhi’s yatra, more people are willing to come out. So even now, people are very scared to speak up. I have no hesitation in saying this on your [podcast]. I know my own colleagues who are very concerned about it, but are hesitant to speak up for obvious reasons, because of the kind of attacks that academia has been facing in my university, JNU, where I spent more than 40 years, people’s pensions have been stopped. Their leaves have been denied. They are harassed and hounded. So what do you expect?

People have to live their everyday lives. Not everyone is going to come out and take big risks of being punished and penalised. A colleague of ours who retired two years ago died without getting his pension. I mean, these are the kind of things that people have been facing. So they had to go to court to even get their pension.

Sidharth: This is a depressing thought that nobody’s speaking up, but it’s now

Mridula: Very few, I would say.

Sidharth: But I’m just thinking how depressing it’s going to be that generations of students probably in UP undergraduate level, maybe high school, maybe lower school will grow up not knowing, as you said about the Industrial Revolution, not knowing about Mahatma Gandhi’s  assassination and the aftermath, not knowing about so many things and not knowing that there was someone like the Mughals who had done a lot of good things in this country also, and it’s wrong to say they were outsiders, they became Indians.

So generations are going to grow up and perhaps some student, at some stage, is going to see Mughal-e-Azam and ask, who are these people. Where did this story come from?

Mridula: You must have seen all the jokes that are now there. With Salim telling Anarkali, ‘Anarkali utho hum syllabus me nahi hai, utho, chlo chalte hai…’

Siddharth: So even all those jokes will have no meaning to somebody. So it is a depressing thought. One can hope that they get reversed. They did get reversed after Dr. Manmohan Singh’s government took over. They did get reversed. But one can only hope. But otherwise to imagine, I mean, you and I, and so many others have passed that stage, but a child entering the CBSE stream today is going to be subject to this kind of schooling.

Mridula: It has a multiplier effect because the NCERT books are also telling you the CBSE syllabus, and they go in tandem. They also tell you the syllabus for the competitive exams.

Sidharth: Yeah.

Mridula: And all the state boards follow the NCERT books, so unless the state takes a conscious decision that we will not follow the NCERT books, then automatically this will get translated down the line.

Sidharth:

Yeah. And civil services also graduates will perhaps have their right.

Mridula: 

Yeah.

Sidharth: So worrying in thought, but thank you professor for explaining it in such detailed context that we now understand. In fact, I was just thinking that UP needed a little bit more highlighting, but we’ll talk about that some stage. That was professor Mridula Mukherji, a veteran and well-known historian who start in JNU and several other centers all around the world, speaking to us about the recent changes in the history and political science syllabus, syllabi of high schools, and undergraduate teaching.

Next week, we’ll be back with another guest. Till then from me, Sidharth Bhatia, and the rest of ‘The Wire Talks’ team, goodbye.