The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has decided to remove almost 70 pages from its Class 9 history textbook, titled “India and the Contemporary World – I”. Three chapters have been taken out. The first, Clothing: A Social History, is on clothing and how social movements influenced how we dressed. The second, History and Sport: The Story of Cricket, is on the history of cricket in India and its connection to the politics of caste, region and community. The third portion to be axed is the chapter titled Peasants and Farmers that focuses on the growth of capitalism and how colonialism altered the lives of peasants and farmers. This is part of the curriculum rationalisation exercise initiated at HRD minister Prakash Javadekar’s behest to reduce the academic burden on students.
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The choice of chapters to be axed, though, is curious—all three focus on caste and class, and the history of social hierarchy in India and power structures. They deal with how caste and class seeped into rules about who could wear what and why, who could play what games, and workers and peasants, their conditions of work under capitalism, the lives they led and their daily struggles. Although Javadekar’s recommendation to the NCERT was to cut the curriculum by half across all subjects, according to The Indian Express, these proposed cuts have been majorly for content in social science textbooks, with minimum trimming for mathematics- and science-based textbooks. While trimming mathematics and science textbooks is difficult, redistributing content across standards isn’t. On the other hand, summarily dropping portions based on peer-reviewed academic work from social science textbooks will impair the learning of children. Not imparting knowledge relating to how the majority of the oppressed and socially ostracised lower caste Indians have lived in the past is to deny teachings on how the same discriminatory forces govern our present-day society. It means obliterating the history of social reform in India. The syllabus rationalisation, if it proceeds in this fashion, will be less rationalisation, more refashioning.
