History writing must go beyond textbooks

Hindustan Times

25-07-2025

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has released the long-awaited social sciences textbook for Class 8, for a captive readership from Ladakh to Pondicherry. Coming up with a textbook is a long haul. First, identify the author/authors. After a lot of 'research', the book is drafted, approved, and published. Then, parents buy these and teachers select 'important' sentences that the students commit to memory. At some stage, these will have to be regurgitated in the exams.
Why then so much discussion on the book, not by children, parents, or school teachers, but by university teachers and public intellectuals? Because groups of the latter on either side of the debate believe such books are endowed with the power to leave an imprint on readers' minds. But, the power of a history textbook is not in the statistics relating to people killed in battles and buildings destroyed — it is in the manner in which change is conveyed. History is dauntingly difficult to write, unless you take refuge behind obscure abstractions.
I recall a conversation from decades ago, in 1986. I was talking to a gentleman, whom I had just informed that I taught history. We discovered we were the same age, and had been in Class IV in 1952. Suddenly, he got animated and asked me whether I remembered the textbooks we had read. A competition of recollection followed. We had both enjoyed British history and been bored by Indian history — the texture of the books, the illustrations, the narrative. We were not a whit less patriotic for that. We both realised that the history of any country, like a play or a novel, can be conveyed either with beauty and even humour, or in a dull and lifeless manner. The NCERT textbooks of 2005 factored in anecdotes and cartoons, only to have the cartoons and illustrations ignored in the classroom and, later, deleted from the books.
Teaching history can be such fun if we let the children fully interact with the teacher on the subject. A public school teacher in England, on the first day of teaching 10-year-olds about the Norman conquest of England, asked them kindly if they had any questions. A little fellow stood up. 'Please, sir, did the Anglo-Saxons wear gloves?' The Cambridge graduate did not know the answer.
In the last 20 years, there has been a wonderful revolution in India — a blossoming of books for children, many of the stories situated in the past. Can't the NCERT have the courage to open up textbooks to competition from young historiographers? One of my students, Subhadra Sengupta, cruelly felled by Covid, had a massive fan following. Her delightful historical novels were despite her lack of attentiveness in class!
There have been many writers who wrote history for children — Charles Dickens (A Child's History of England), Jawaharlal Nehru, while in prison (Letters from a Father to a Daughter).
The world knows EH Gombrich, the art historian, but it was only in 2005 that his first book, written in 1936 in German, was translated into English, as A Little History of the World. He had written it when he was 26, in six weeks, with energy, humour, and imagination. I am sure we have many chhupa Gombriches in our country, who can relieve tired and solemn middle-aged writers of the burden of communicating with the young.
Narayani Gupta is a Delhi-based historian. The views expressed are personal.