History is being tested in India. Education and textbooks have continuously been at the centre of scrutiny amidst the rise of the Hindu nationalist BJP government. Textbooks vary, not only from state to state but from school to school. Both the state and central government produce their own textbooks. Local schools can base their instruction on curriculums supplied by either the central government or the state governments. However, as younger generations in India seek greater mobility across the subcontinent, there has been an increased prioritisation of national examinations based on central government curricula.
Under the BJP’s influence, significant changes have been made to school textbooks, framing India’s history with a Hindu-centric focus. History has been constantly evoked as a space for political and ideological debate by the current BJP government. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spoken at length about so-called “concocted narratives” in modern retellings of India’s history, disputing the place of non-Hindus in India’s history.
Countering fascism
“History is a very political subject in the sense that all governments have their own kind of histories to push,” said Anwesha Sengupta, a historian and academic at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata. “If you ask me, is this unprecedented? No, it is not. But the degree is unprecedented, and the ideology is more dangerous. It’s a fascist ideology.”
Textbook revisionism becomes particularly dangerous in the context of the Indian education focus on rote memorisation. Even after students graduate from school, these history textbooks play a critical role in political discourse amidst rife misinformation in the news and online that blends fact and fiction. “Not only the child, but even the adults cannot make any distinction between these two, they cannot understand which one is history, and which one is perhaps propaganda, in the sense that the history books do not train you,” said Sengupta.
“I think young minds are being infected in ways that are deeply troubling. There are numerous instances of children engaging in everyday acts of violence against their own classmates who might be Muslim or just non-Hindu,” said Gaurav Mukherjee, Visiting Assistant Professor of Law and the Stuart F Smith Teaching Fellow at the University of Connecticut and a former Hauser Postdoctoral Global Fellow at NYU Law. “There needs to be bottom-up and top-down mobilisation to push back against these changes.”
At the Institute for Development Studies Kolkata, academics, historians, and teachers are working to push back against this revisionist history through an initiative in Bengali titled Ithihashe Hatekhari. Funded by Rosa Luxemburg Schiftung, the three-year project is publishing children’s history books for late elementary school and middle-grade students that centre on the diversity of India and the narratives of those often marginalised.
“There are two things we try to do, with intersectionality as a lens. We want children to understand how gender, caste, and religion come together to shape my worldview but also to shape my past,” says Anwesha Sengupta in her office after finishing her lunch of rice and daal. An academic and historian at the Institute for Development Studies Kolkata. Trained as a historian, Sengupta is one of the head coordinators of this project.
“The other ethical point we have in mind as historians is that there can be multiple experiences and in all these multiple narratives there can be different heroes and different villains. So there has to be space for all of these narratives. The idea is to encourage the reader to be empathetic towards other possibilities,” she adds. The initiative has published nine books, covering the partition of India, language diversity, citizenship, the tea trade, ongoing wars, the politics of river boundaries, food, clothes, and attire.
These historical narratives directly provide a foundation for understanding contemporary issues of debate. In exposing students to the history of the various dialects across India in their book The Languages of Our Country, the project offers a foundation to understand the pushback against the current BJP government’s attempts to impose Hindi as a national language.
While writing the book on Partition, Sengupta spent time in historical archives to uncover narratives specific to minority experiences. In one chapter, she writes about lower-caste workers who were sent to the Andaman Islands during the partition. In another, she focuses primarily on young women’s experiences.
Being Indian
“My point was to counter the narratives that are being circulated on social media and also through political speeches and also some of the textbooks that Hindus were the only victims,” says Sengupta.
Sengupta considers their book Desher Manoosh, or Citizens of Our Country, their most political book in the context of the Citizenship Amendment Act. “We use several life stories to give a sense to the children about how marginalised people are often further marginalised through these acts,” she said, expanding the scope of discourse to consider not only how the CAA particularly targets Muslims, but also negatively impacts poor and lower-caste communities at the borders.
These books confront complex issues that are difficult to dissect, even for adults. As a trained historian, Sengupta has found herself contending with complex issues like nationhood and citizenship while writing the text. “We are not questioning the idea of India, we are not questioning the idea of ‘Indian’,” she said. “What we are trying to convey is how this concept of Indian and India is historically constructed and constantly changing. As an academic writing for a more mature audience who are trained in social science, would I like to push this binary further? Yes, I would. But, when I’m writing for younger children, I’m kind of accepting this.”
The nine books have been published in Bengali, English, and Assamese. And Sengupta has heard from individual readers who have worked to translate the text into their regional languages, including Malayalam and Marathi.
The institute initially published 250 booklets in Bangla and 100 booklets in both English and Assam that they distributed for free among a network of schoolteachers and reading groups who were looking for materials to offer students a broader perspective of history in the wake of textbook revisions and curriculum centralisation. These books function as supplementary tools, taught by teachers during free periods or after school.
Additionally, Itihase Hatekhari books have been made available via free PDFs that the Institute has published online. This decentralised dissemination makes it difficult to estimate the exact number of people reading these books, though Sengupta estimates the number is around 1,500. Beyond the intended audience of children, the institute is also receiving feedback from adult readers who have found their work helpful resources to understand and learn about the nuanced background of contemporary debated issues. Coordinating with publishers in both London and West Bengal, the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata hopes that these books will be available on the market to be purchased by the end of 2025.
Making difficult choices
The initiative is also hosting workshops and storytelling sessions in Kolkata to encourage students to write and imagine alongside the books. These programmes specifically work with children from underprivileged backgrounds. They’ve partnered with the Sanghati School, an organisation that provides additional instruction for children living in slums. Workshops have also particularly targeted the children of sex workers, Muslim families, and village labourers. In 2023, a little less than 100 students attended.
“It seems huge, but in terms of actual numbers, it’s nothing. It’s not comparable to the other kinds of changes that are happening,” Sengupta said.
The Institute for Development Studies Kolkata found themselves constantly thinking about potential backlash to their efforts. They never faced explicit threats from the government or nationalist forces. Instead, it was friends and colleagues who encouraged them to be careful about what they published out of fear for their safety.
As a result, their book on Partition limits mentions Kashmir, but only two sentences are used to gesture toward the fact that many of the boundaries drawn during Partition are still incomplete and fuel modern conflict. “Initially we thought we’d have a separate chapter on it [Kashmir] but then people said that would generate so much controversy that the books may get banned and that’s not our intention,” said Sengupta. “We want the books to be read.”
While translating their book on citizenship from English to Assamese, they removed references to detention camps in Assam at the translator’s insistence. “We figured that since the translator is based in Guwahati, and if something happens, it would affect him and not us,” said Sengupta.
Additionally, in their forthcoming book on food cultures, they limited their mentions of beef. Beef has been a contentious issue amidst the rise of right-wing Hindu nationalism, with “cow vigilante” riots targeting those suspected of eating beef or slaughtering cows. Though they originally hoped to expand on the misconceptions around beef consumption in India, after editing the book they limited themselves to a few sentences where they asserted that beef has been eaten in India throughout history.
“We are not too adventurous. That has been a complaint actually, [but] getting things banned, that’s not our purpose,” said Sengupta. Their fear emerges in the context of a broader political environment of harassment and mob violence against those who contradict mainstream Hindu nationalist narratives.
“Books are being attacked, books are being burned, books are being banned. All sorts of things are happening. Particularly history has emerged as one of the central battlegrounds,” said Baidik Bhattacharya, an Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies. Bhattacharya cites the case of Wendy Doniger, a professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, whose book The Hindus: An Alternative History faced such extreme vitriol after publication that Penguin India recalled all copies. As he sees it, the case served as a warning to future authors and publishers.
The Institute of Development Studies Kolkata has never received any explicit threats against Itihase Hatekhari. But the fear of potential backlash was enough of a catalyst for self-censorship. In comparison to cases of explicit backlash and book banning, self-censorship is far quieter. It’s impossible to measure what authors have decided not to write in when confronted by an atmosphere hostile to free speech.
“The climate of fear creates a sense of pressure on authors [to] self-censor. They are producing the kind of literature which would be approved by this current regime, but literature also has this other side too,” said Bhattacharya. “Writing is something which is often subversive, often contradictory to political forces.” But even with self-censorship, initiatives like Itihase Hatekhari utilise storytelling as an opportunity to disrupt and counterbalance right-wing nationalist narratives threatening to overtake current discourse.
Norah Das Rami is a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania studying English and Political Science.
