The Hindutva View of History: Rewriting Textbooks in India and the United States

When Hindu nationalist (or Sangh Parivar) organizations in India came to power at the national level in 1998, one of the first things they did was to establish a National Curriculum Framework (NCF) to change textbook content. The 2000 NCF curriculum debate reflected the intense conflict between competing visions of national identity that had dominated India’s public and political discourse over the previous two decades. In a significant departure from earlier curriculum frameworks of 1972 and 1986, which stressed democratic values, social justice, and national integration through appreciation of the commonalities of different subcultures, the principal focus of the NCF was “value education.”1 The chief end of history, as of education as a whole, was presented as the development of a “national spirit” and “national consciousness” through generating pride in the younger generation regarding India’s past and its unique “religio-philosophical ethos, which was presented as primarily Hindu.” These actions were vociferously challenged by academics and progressive, secular, liberal, or left groups who decried the Sangh Parivar’s ideological efforts to recast history. In the summer and fall months of 2005, U.S. “Hindu” Kamala Visweswaran is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. Culture&Society