Flashman And The Mountain Of Textbooks

The new NCERT textbooks are not yet available in the market; their appearance, cleared last week by the Supreme Court, is likely to spark off agitated debate over their contents.

Proponents of the textbooks, especially the one that deals with Indian history, have hailed them as ushering in a brave new world where the truth about Bharat is finally revealed. Opponents, and these include most serious historians, have pointed out that the new textbooks are written by historians whose credentials can be questioned. They are also dismayed by the possibility that these books will distort or suppress historical fact under the pretext that some facts of history are hurtful to religious sentiments.

On one score at least I have no doubt: that the new history textbooks, however accurate or inaccurate, literate or illiterate they may be, will be every bit as boring as the old. The debate over fact itself has been turned into a bitter wrangle that seeks to portray historical facts as malleable.

In this view, historical facts are merely pieces of data that change shape and meaning depending on whether they