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Contested Indian History #5: "Secular History"

In the early 1960’s, the topic of national integration became the paramount concern of Nehru as communal riots, language-based secessionist movements, and regional demands exploded. To that end (national integration), terms like “religion”, “caste” and “language” became sociopolitical categories with specific definitions (set by the Center) and mandatory for states to follow, writes Shaan Kashyap in Who Owns History? “Schools as an institution and school textbooks as site of knowledge were given the responsibility to fabricate national integration.”   History books had to serve an agenda (national integration). To give credibility to the books, respected historians of the day were called to help write history textbooks for schools. Many historians squirmed at factual accuracy being demoted to a secondary role. But other historians agreed – some because they agreed with the positive motive behind the ask, others opportunistically to gain brownie points with those in power. His...
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No AIDS via Mosquitoes

I ran into yet another question which made me wonder why it (the question, not the answer) hadn’t even occurred to me. As icing on the cake, the answer turned out to be even more fascinating.   The question? If sharing a needle can spread AIDS, why can’t a mosquito spread it too? They look like “tiny flying syringes”, they pierce the skin, they draw blood, they bite multiple people. Those details are relevant to malaria, why not AIDS?   Now for the answer. A syringe is a single tube. Blood goes in, blood comes out. A mosquito’s proboscis, on the other hand, has two tubes. One sucks blood out. The other injects saliva into you (to prevent the blood from clotting). “You’re not getting the last person’s blood. You’re getting mosquito spit.” HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, does not live in spit. Thankfully.   In addition, a syringe or a razor blade doesn’t digest anything. It is a neutral surface on which the HIV virus can stay peacefully. A mosquito’s stoma...
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Contested Indian History #4: State Controversies

Education was a state subject at independence. The first controversy based on a state history textbook was in 1957 when the CPI formed the government in Kerala. Via the Election Bill, Kerala restricted the hitherto unlimited powers enjoyed by private management in the field of education, and conversely, gave the state government far greater power in setting textbooks, writes Shaan Kashyap in Who Owns History?   Large pictures of Karl Marx, Lenin and Mao adorned Class 8 textbooks.   The Russian Revolution was glorified. China, the books said, would race ahead of India because they were communist. The achievements of non-communist countries were ignored. Not surprisingly, a huge uproar followed, both within Kerala and from sections of the Center. Accusations of “communist history” and “ideological indoctrination” to brainwash the next generation flew around. “They have a found in the nationalization of textbooks a fertile ground for indoctrination.”   The Directo...
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Liberia as a Human Dumping Ground

By 1816, slavery was illegal in America. Though, on the ground, it still existed to varying degrees in various places. (White) America now had a “problem”, write Natalia Cintra and Tosin Durodola. What if the free blacks instigated or inspired slave uprisings? Other whites asked why free blacks should even be in America – if they weren’t slaves, they didn’t serve any purpose…   Their “solution”? “Literally deport free black Americans and freed slaves to a settlement they hoped to create in the African motherland.” That then is the origin story for Liberia, a country on the Atlantic coast of Africa, a country/colony where “race, racism, and anti-black slavery meet yet another type of forced movement: deportation”. By 1819, this was institutionalized to the point that America was deporting the people found in illegal slave ships to Liberia, regardless of their origin. ~~   Now you could say that was all horrifying, no doubt, but it was so long back. Why rake it up...
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Contested Indian History #3: Independence

Once India became independent, there was a desire to document the freedom struggle. To that end, the records of the Indian Historical Records Commission (IHRC) had to be made accessible. But the content was too much – no one historian could go through it all. It had to be a collective activity, and it felt necessary to involve the Indian government, writes Shaan Kashyap in Who Owns History?   President Rajendra Prasad too felt that the “role of history” in nation building was critical, so he full heartedly supported the initiative. Not just the independence struggle but also its “distant and glorious past”. Prasad may have been sincere, but it would set the precedent of what would follow: “The mandate to the professional historians was provided by the speeches of the politicians.” The seeds had been sown – History was not just reporting events; it was meant to serve the present. Back then, that purpose was “nationalizing the past”. The intelligentsia agreed that Nehruvian I...
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Meal-time Hunger and Skipping Meals

As meal-time approaches, we begin to feel hungry. Increasingly so. But why does that feeling go away even if we skip that meal ? Why didn’t the hunger get more and more intense?   The answer lies in endocrinology. I remember seeing almost all the salient points from my then 14 yo daughter’s Biology book; but it is only when you connect all those raw facts that you get the answer.   If we don’t know that, we (wrongly) assume hunger is a signal that keeps rising until we eat. But that’s not how the body work. Yes, it starts at meal-time when the gherlin level spikes. But if the food doesn’t arrive, the gherlin level eventually crashes (but it takes an hour or two for that to happen).   In parallel, without the food intake, your blood glucose level falls. In response, the body releases counter-regulatory hormones – glucagon, cortisol and epinephrine. This glucagon goes to the liver and breaks down the older stores of glycogen in the liver, thereby dumping glucose...
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Contested Indian History #2: British Era

The roots of the contests over history lie in the fact that education systems (world over) teach history. To school kids. Most of whom will never read any history, beyond schoolbooks. And so the government of the day, via its power to set the books of curriculum, gets to decide what is accepted as “the past”. The term “indoctrination” is used by the opposition to describe this phenomenon, explains Shaan Kashyap in Who Owns History?   He gives an example. From the British era. With so many vernacular texts, there were contradictions. So much so that even locals (Bengal, Madras etc) asked the British to help instil some order to the vernacular texts. So they tried. In 1872, Syed Ahmed Khan confronted the North-West Frontier Province government on the matter about the way books presented certain Muslim figures and their actions (including the execution of a Sikh leader). Note that Khan was not challenging the events – he was unhappy about the tone/ presentation of those events t...
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