Despite flaws, new NCERT textbooks try to reconnect youngsters with their civilisation's moral foundations

Indian Express

15-05-2025

Written by R S Krishna
Rupamanjari Hegde's critique of recent Class VII NCERT history textbooks ('In NCERT textbooks, a history full of holes', IE, May 5) highlights a recurring trend in liberal-secular discourse: A focus on inconsistencies between curricular frameworks (like the NCF 2023) and textbook narratives, while overlooking the deeper philosophical and civilisational dimensions of how India should relate to its past. While Hegde rightly points out the dissonance between pluralistic curricular intentions and selective textbook content, this perspective misses a crucial point: Such selectivity, often labelled 'presentism' or 'teleology,' can be necessary and legitimate in crafting a national historical consciousness.
The liberal-secular viewpoint often assumes that only histories emphasising disjunction, pluralism, conflict, and power are truly honest, casting any narrative of harmony, unity, or coherence as inherently fabricated or aligned with communal ideologies. This perspective, rooted in Marxist and postcolonial paradigms, views civilisational continuity or cultural cohesion with scepticism, interpreting them as mere apologetics for majoritarianism or nationalism. However, this approach itself commits a form of presentism, retrojecting a modern suspicion of unity onto the past and privileging discontinuity as the sole valid historical lens.
History as a quest for civilisational self-understanding
A civilisationally self-aware modernity cannot afford to discard the potential for collective memory, moral exemplarity, and a unifying vision of the past. Nations are not solely defined by constitutions; they are also 'imagined,' 'felt,' and 'remembered' into being. Consequently, history education cannot be reduced to a mere catalogue of empirical disputes, caste hierarchies, and dynastic rivalries.
This necessitates interpretation, selection, and narrative framing, which are inherent to the process and therefore legitimate. For decades, Indian school textbooks, particularly after the NCERT's 2006 revisions, aimed at 'detoxifying' earlier 'saffron' narratives', have often prioritised a seemingly 'objective' approach, foregrounding multiplicity and conflict, emphasising regional variations, and downplaying any overarching sense of pre-colonial Indic unity. However, this has not fostered a deeper understanding of India's civilisational past, but rather an inability to articulate it except in mostly fragmented and contestatory terms.
Pre-Islamic India, despite its political disunity and social hierarchies, did share cosmologies, Sanskritic idioms across its regions and languages, integrated diverse deities and contributed to a porous but coherent cultural order. This coherence, while not homogeneous, was not a mere colonial invention. The new NCERT textbooks, despite their flaws, represent an attempt to reinstate this coherence, reconnecting young Indians to their civilisation's moral and cultural foundations.
The ethical imperative of presentism
So a degree of presentism and even teleology in historical narratives is not a betrayal of historiography, but a civilisational necessity. A modern democratic republic needs a usable past, a memory that resonates normatively. History textbooks should certainly have source criticism or highlight socio-economic mechanics; but they should also guide students to locate themselves within a broader narrative of how a people conceived a certain kind of socio-cultural order across time and traditions. And such orders were not merely oppressive caste and patriarchal institutions and practices.
While liberal-secular historians advocate for narratives that avoid privileging any single religion or moral arc, it's important to recognise that all historical storytelling, particularly in school education, involves moral construction. Even previous NCERT attempts, which celebrated Bhakti and Sufi syncretism, implicitly endorsed a normative vision of India as plural and tolerant. However, they often failed to acknowledge that this pluralism could have indigenous Indic roots, predating Islamic influence, as seen in Buddhist missions, Ashokan dhamma, and pan-Indic pilgrimage networks.
The new textbooks, by emphasising certain pre-Islamic periods, attempt to recover these threads, not to demonise Islam, but to re-anchor India's pluralism in a deeper Indic context. And possibly, let us wait to see if between classes VIII to X, the new textbooks do bring in Mughals, Delhi Sultanate, Bahmani or Bengal Sultans into some reckoning. As things appear, few apprehend the risk of Hindu triumphalism. Yet liberal-secular historians have also been guilty of selectively emphasising pluralism while minimising the sociopolitical subordination and subjugation of non-Muslims under Islamic regimes for constructing a secular past.
The need for new imaginations
So while the new textbooks have a laudable impulse, their execution lacks nuanced explanations and dialogical pedagogy. I agree with Hegde at one level when she highlights that they do not adequately explain how history is constructed, how different kinds of sources yield different truths, or how moral judgments must be distinguished from factual claims. However, I contend it fails not just Hegde's test of pluralism but also the deeper civilisational project that it ostensibly champions. It merely gestures towards civilisational memory but offers only superficial fragments, lacking philosophical grounding and pedagogic possibilities.
The need of the hour is a curriculum that would not sanitise the past or erase conflict, but present them within a broader ethical framework, where critique doesn't descend into cynicism, and diversity doesn't preclude coherence. It would draw upon figures like Chanakya, Ashoka, Harsha, Pulakesin, Raja Raja Chola, Ramanuja, and Basava, not as mere icons, but as windows into India's diverse civilisational strategies. It would teach students not just to dissect the past, but to inhabit it, exploring the ideas, institutions, and beliefs that enabled societies to endure, reform, and flourish.
Hegde's critique reflects a broader failure within Indian academia to envision history as a space for moral and civilisational reflection. It forgets that nations are not solely born from protest, but also from shared narratives of song, scripture, myth, and memory. Educating a generation without these resources risks creating mere inhabitants, not citizens where having a civilisational selfhood is key to navigate modernity. What we need is not less narrative, but better narrative, one that can carry the weight of a civilization into the classrooms of a republic.
The writer is a retired school teacher based in Bengaluru, who has worked with TVS Educational Society institutions and Azim Premji Foundation, Bengaluru