Frankly, like awards juries, what is chucked from a syllabus and what goes in tells you more about the boffins putting it together, and less about whether the syllabus is up to scratch. If The Kashmir Files didn’t get a sackload of Oscars, it says a lot about the Academy Awards jury’s colonial mindset, not about any kamti in Vivek Agnihotri‘s R&AW talent.
So when the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), in its wisdom (sic), decided to ‘rationalise’ Class 12 textbooks by dropping bits and bobs to lighten ‘students’ load’ as recommended by the National Education Policy, my first reaction 33 years after passing out of school was: ‘Where were you guys when I was drowning in my Nelkon & Parker Advanced Level Physics textbook? Why didn’t anyone take out the chapter on ‘Velocity of Transverse Wave in a String’? Recalling V = kFxlymx has no bearing on making India a $5 trillion economy!’
My second reaction was, ‘So?’ It’s not as if not finding any mention of the Mughals will make graffiti like ‘Mumtaz Mahal Taj Mahal’ disappear. Nor is it like generations, starting this semester, will be denied the knowledge that hydrogen sulfide smells of rotten eggs, a far more useful thing to learn than remembering the mnemonic BHAJI SABJI FOR MAAM-SAAB and then having to remember what the mnemonic stands for – Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb… after which no one barring Irfan Habib remembers the names except for that last B for Bahadur Shah Zafar.
But since no one ever has a slanging match in one’s RWA WhatsApp group on the efficacy of Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem, or whether cadmium oxide should be the Lewis-acid catalyst of choice in hydrolysis, it’s history that serves as everyone’s football to kick around and sound smart with. Fair enough.
By trimming the Mughals out, though, the NCERT’s pedagogues may unwittingly cause larger disruption. Here are a few possibilities staring at generations without recourse to Class 12 Mughal history, and presumably no access to other sources of information like ChatGPT, Amar Chitra Katha, Ashutosh Gowariker-directed or Dilip Kumar-Madhubala-Prithviraj Kapoor-starring movies….
Rana Pratap, Guru Hargobind Singh, Chhatrapati Shivaji, and other valiants may find it a tad difficult to be remembered for their valour minus their prime antagonists. Without Akbar, Jahangir and Aurangzeb, Haldighati, Rohilla and Chakan would possibly become locations for potato and pomegranate cold chain units, leaving our heroes much like Real Madrid without Barcelona; Jai, Veeru and Thakur without Gabbar. Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi may have to be reimagined – and renamed – with people learning to say, ‘Let’s meet outside that place with a big dome that looks like that other place in Agra with a big dome.
The abuse ‘Babur ki aulad’ and variations thereof will have to fall into disrepair. ‘Those people’ being too diffused a gaali, true secularism will descend, calamitously ending much enthusiasm at least among one lot of enthusiastic sectarians with little work and lots of time on their hands.
British colonialism will become much tougher to explain without the Mughal ‘long tail’. The Battle of Palashi may no longer be viewed as a battle at all, with history describing Robert Clive and his men spending that hot, humid summer of June 23, 1757, picking mangoes and starting the very first round of negotiations for the soon-to-be signed FTA between UK and whoever was the mango grove’s owner.
In any case, Mughal history, to my mind, features disproportionately – second only to pre-independence history. B-o-r-i-n-g. I mean, centuries from now, would future generations like to find this last decade dulled by only one overpowering Mughlai-type narrative? Drop the Mughals from textbooks, I say. And while we’re at it, that grisly chapter on rotation of rigid bodies from physics textbooks too.
