Saffronisation reaches US shores

California is witnessing a raging battle between pro-Hindutva and secular academics, writes S Rajagopalan.

The controversy over Indian history textbooks has travelled to the US. So much so, California is currently witnessing a raging battle between pro-Hindutva groups and "secular" academics over textbooks on Indian history presented to "impressionable minds" in the US.

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The pro-Hindutva groups are in the forefront of a campaign to revise the textbooks on the ground that they show ancient India in poor light and single out Hinduism for "bias, distortions and prejudicial treatment". The "secular" formation, on the other hand, has plunged into the battle with equal fervour, warning the California Board of Education (CBE) against making revisions of "a religious-political nature".

Among issue whipped up in this battle are the reported projections about ancient India, the Aryan invasion, the caste system and the status of women in India. Faced with the clashing viewpoints of the two formations, the CBE is still to make public the nature and extent of revisions that it proposes to make in the books on Indian history and culture for students in grades six to eight.

On Wednesday, the Hindu groups charged the CBE with going back on the recommendations made by an expert it had appointed to go into the controversy — Shiva Bajpai of California State University, Northridge.

The rival group is led by Michael Witzel, an American professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University, and has the support of a number of academicians including Indian historians Romilla Thapar, D.N.Jha and Shereen Ratnagar.

Witzel, in a letter to CBE president Ruth Green, suggested that the groups seeking revision have a hidden agenda. "The proposed revisions are not of a scholarly but of a religious-political nature, and are primarily promoted by Hindutva supporters and non-specialist academics," he commented.

Reacting to the charge, Ved Chaudhary, president of the Educators' Society for the Heritage of India (ESHI), said: "The ESHI totally rejects the last minute interjection of a group called IER (Indo-Eurasian Research), who were not involved in the reviews".

About 200 changes have been sought by the Hindu groups, led by the Texas-based Vedic Foundation and the New Jersey-based Hindu Education Foundation.