Book Reviews : KRISHNA KUMAR, Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan, New Delhi: Viking, Penguin India, Rs 395

Abstract

This is a book about history teaching. It examines several school textbooks from India and Pakistan that deal with the freedom struggles in these countries for a purpose: to understand how they remember their not-so-distant and shared past, and the manner in which they bequeath that memory to their young. Krishna Kumar’s careful and incisive analysis of these school books demonstrates how their discursive coordinates are, in fact, determined by the imperatives of nationbuilding and good citizenship. Stories are told or not told, elaborated or paraphrased, made mute or eloquent to produce narratives that instil in the young a measure of patriotic pride and loyalty. In the textbook world, the agents of history are not men and women, who act at the behest of circumstances which are given to them and which they actively try to transform. Rather, they constitute a veritable pantheon that the child is expected to automatically venerate and emulate. The past, in this reckoning of time, exists chiefly as exemplum-it is a morality tale that can only be understood in stark oppositional terms: nationalist/(imperial) loyalist, Hindu/Muslim, secular/ communal. History itself is an adventure story, episodic in the main, and dramatic, in what are clearly its climactic moments-August 1942, Direct Action day .... Why has history teaching in both countries assumed this allegorical form? For one, this has to do with how education is conceived in either-a learning and committing to memory, sets of facts that encapsulate, rather than explicate and interpret meaning. Textbooks are central to this enterprise and the history textbook, like its counterparts, exists only for this purpose-to demand a knowing that is enumerative and formal.