DNA Edit: Is Dina Nath Batra trying to ‘engineer’ education?

Dina Nath Batra, the head of the RSS-affiliated Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas, has made a host of recommendations to the National Council of Educational Research and Training, which, if implemented, will only serve to ‘sanitise’ the curriculum for students from the 1st to the 12th grade.

Some of the recommendations include removing Urdu and Persian words, along with verses of Mirza Ghalib and other poets, and expunging writings of Rabindranath Tagore, chunks from the autobiography of MF Hussain, allusions to Mughal emperors as benevolent rulers as well as an apology offered by former PM Manmohan Singh.

The story, first unearthed by DNA, and followed up recently by another daily, shows that different political establishments are still to rid themselves of their penchant for glossing over instances that do not sit well with their ideologies or biases. Pray tell, what harm would students come to if they are to learn a couplet by Mirza Ghalib? Wiping out verses from Ghalib will only render the children ignorant of his cultural legacy, the beauty of his poetry and the gratitude that many a modern author owes him.

If the agenda is to completely obliterate Ghalib from collective memory, then one is afraid that this is a task far bigger than whatever heft an ideological organisation can muster.

The same holds true for writings of Tagore, whose works inform a brief but forceful phase of the history of Indian literature. Anyhow, Tagore has syncretised so fluidly in the life and breath of Indian culture that removing him from children’s textbooks will only be an embarrassment for the education boards.

The Nyas, in a vein of specious logic, has proffered that learning Urdu, Persian or English words creates learning challenges for students and that the curriculum should be limited to using Hindi. Unsaid here is that the Nyas is attempting to mould history, and simultaneously the future, to meet its own projections and beliefs.

It is to this end that the Nyas had opened another front against the inclusion of an essay by AK Ramanujan titled ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation’ in Delhi University’s undergraduate syllabus. The organisation had also moved court seeking the withdrawal as well destruction of all existing copies of Wendy Donger’s book ‘The Hindus: An Alternative History’. Bulldozing one’s cultural agenda on others does not a strong and vibrant democracy make. Expunging Indian history of its rich, varied and controversial facets is on par with advancing a linear narrative against the often strained but composite culture of India.