kolkata, india – In the three-story building of Sarada Shishu Vidya Mandir, a school for grades 5 to 10 in the town of Uluberia in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, students spend 15 minutes each day starting their classes. They are gathered in the chapel in front.
The walls of the chapel are covered with colorful posters depicting Hindu gods, saints, mythological figures, ancient Indian scholars, kings, and Hindu religious acts. The prayer begins with Saraswati Vandana, a chant praising Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge.
The same routine continues at the neighboring Sarada Shishu Mandir (a primary school for children up to grade four).
When students entered the classroom after prayers, they heard the same ancient figure in a series of books called Sanskriti Bodmala (Cultural Awareness Manual) published in English, Hindi and several other Indian languages. will be encountered again. Sanskrit Bodmala books are compulsory for students of classes 4 to 12 and they also have to take a nationally coordinated annual test based on these books.
For more than two centuries, millions of Indians, especially Hindus, have read about the ideas and philosophies of the ancient scholars of the so-called Vedic period (1500 BC to 500 BC), when much of the religion’s scriptures were written. I continued.
However, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, many of these concepts have permeated India’s vast formal schooling system, creating boundaries between Hindu religious beliefs on the one hand and established history and science on the other. The lines are blurred.
In a country where half the population is under the age of 25, this has prompted Prime Minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its Hindu-majority partners to use pedagogy to reach the hearts and minds of millions of young Indians. critics say it gave him the ability to influence people. This will be the first time they will be voting in the national election, which is expected to be held from March to May.
From atoms to aviation
The book was aimed at students in grades 4 and 6 and says that the Vedic era philosopher Canada was the world’s first atomic scientist.
Mr. Kaneda does indeed write in his book Vaishesika Darshan that Anu (atom) is the smallest particle of matter that cannot be further divided. However, the substances he listed – Prithvi (earth), Jala (water), Tejas (fire), Vayu (air), Akasha (ether), Kala (time), Dik (space), Atma (soul), Manas ( mind) — the scientists said, please clarify that he was speaking in philosophical or metaphysical terms.
The fifth grade textbook states that the Vedic saint Bharadwaja, who is said to have written the book Vimanika Shastra (Aviation Science), was the “father of aviation.” Class 5 and 12 books refer to the ancient Indian physician Sushruta as the “inventor of plastic surgery”.
The Bodamara book in Sanskrit is not approved by the government. But these have been taught in addition to the state-approved curriculum for decades in large chains of schools run by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the far-right ideological leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
These schools are officially run by Vidya Bharati, the education wing of the RSS, which manages over 12,000 schools serving nearly 32 million students across India. These schools are affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) or the Government Board of Education of the state where they are located.
In recent years, unsubstantiated historical and scientific claims taught in Vidya Bharati schools have been incorporated into the official curriculum of state-run schools.
Canada’s atomic theory and Sushruta’s plastic surgery claims are already part of the curriculum of the National Institute of Open Schools (NIOS), a federal education board. NIOS calls itself “the world’s largest open school system with a cumulative enrollment of 4.13 million students.” [during last five years]” student.
The NIOS curriculum also encourages students to learn about Vedic mathematics. This is another subject that is specially taught in RSS schools.
A new module by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) on India’s lunar exploration says that the book Vimanika Shastra “seems to reveal that our civilization had knowledge of flying vehicles. “It has said.
NCERT is the apex body that advises the Union and State governments on school education, including model textbooks. However, various state education boards are likely to pursue their own syllabuses, different from his NCERT advice. Among the federal government boards, CBSE had 1.2 million students appear for the 12th grade exam and 1.8 million students appeared for the 10th grade exam in 2020.
In 2019, Union Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal said, “Long before Newton discovered gravity, the concept of gravity was mentioned in our scriptures.” The same is said in the Sanskrit Bodmala books, one by the 5th century mathematician Aryabhatta and the other by the 12th century mathematician Bhaskaracharya.
“The Sanskrit Bodmala book does not conflict with the official syllabus, as the history presented here is not consistent with the existing official syllabus, which completely ignores India’s pre-Mughal history. Because there is a complete lack of it. That is what we are emphasizing,” Proloj Adhikari, head of Sarada Vidya Mandir in Uluberia, told Al Jazeera.
He said the National Education Policy (NEP) introduced by the Modi government has been implemented in schools in Vidya Bharati state for several years.
“The NEP has expanded some of our school practices to a broader scope,” he said, adding that more information from the Sanskrit Bodmala book will be incorporated into the formal national school curriculum. I expected that.
“Brilliant culture”
Vidya Bharati said cultural awareness tests for students were introduced in schools “with the aim of transmitting our glorious culture to the new generation”.
West Bengal Vidya Bharati official Devanshu Kumar Pati claimed that the contents of their book were well researched. “We are educating our students about the history that colonialists and Marxist historians have suppressed to make generations of Hindus feel inferior,” he told Al Jazeera.
But historians, scientists and other critics, as well as Marxists, have accused the Modi government of altering school curriculum to suit Hindu nationalist agendas.
Hilal Ahmed, associate professor of history at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in New Delhi, told Al Jazeera: “The discovery of the past is always in the future, so telling a new history, as long as it is appropriate, will help everyone. I can’t be blamed,” he said. The method of history is followed. ”
“Historical writing is a complex process, so serious historians must understand the requirements for verifying the veracity of sources, the introduction of sources, and how information is interpreted and relevance established. “We have evolved methods and procedures such as explaining. But these schools are not following the procedure of citing significant history,” he said.
Ahmed believes that the Sanskrit Bodmala textbook presents history as if it has discovered the “last truth of the past” and calls the textbook “anti-student”.
“They are introducing a kind of pedagogy that does not allow students to understand for themselves the meaning of the past. Students will become hostile to alternative interpretations of history. “It prevents us from thinking about the past anew,” he said.
Jayant Vishnu Narlikar, one of India’s most famous cosmologists, debunked such claims in his 2003 book The Scientific Edge: The Indian Scientist from Vedic to Modern Times. Most claims about modern scientific discoveries of Vedic origin “do not stand up to scientific scrutiny,” Narlikar wrote, adding: “There’s no question that they were interested in space. But they knew that what modern science is saying today is unacceptable.”
In 2023, Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) chief S. Breakthrough Science said: In a statement, the BSS asked, “If great knowledge such as astronomy and aeronautical engineering is available in ancient Sanskrit texts, why is ISRO not making use of them?”
“Can he? [Somanath] Name one technology or theory that ISRO has taken from the Vedas and applied in building rockets and satellites. ” the statement asked. BSS is a group of rationalist scientists based in Kolkata.
From fringe to mainstream
Vidya Bharati’s role in promoting a kind of history is part of a larger project that critics call the “saffronization” of education, after the preferred colors of the Hindu right. This is the process pursued by the Modi government and the institutions under its control.
The Sanskriti Bodhira book is published by the Vidya Bharati Sanskriti Shiksha Sansthan, whose former president Govind Prasad Sharma is a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party government’s National Curriculum Framework established in 2021. He was a member of the steering committee.
Of the 25 focus groups formed by the state-run NCERT to develop a national curriculum framework based on the creation of new textbooks for government schools, five had Vidya Bharati officials as members.
Ramakrishna Rao, national president of Vidya Bharati, said that in many Indian states, “senior and retired school teachers” are being hired to write textbooks for public schools.
“Vidya Bharati has done its best and provided generous support to the government. [education] The policy has been in preparation for almost five years,” Rao wrote in a column on a right-wing website in 2021.
Some of these school principals and executives are members of the National Teacher Professional Standards Development Board, and nearly every state task force for NEP implementation has a representative to “actively monitor” the process. Rao added. .
“Apprehend the youthful spirit of Hinduism”
Similar efforts to change school curriculum took place between 1999 and 2004, when the BJP formed its first-ever federal government.
The key name that was floated for this project was Dinanath Batra, then general secretary of Vidya Bharati. Shortly after Mr. Modi took over national politics in 2014, his home state of Gujarat made Batra’s books compulsory in public schools.
Even though internationally acclaimed historians such as Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib have accused Batra of turning both history and geography into fantasies, Batra He is a pioneer historian.
Niranjan Mukhopadhyay, a journalist who has written several books on Hindu nationalism and has also written a biography of Prime Minister Modi, told Al Jazeera that Vidya Bharati schools are part of the RSS’s larger strategy to establish hegemony in all fields, including education. He said it was a department.
Mukhopadhyay said the idea behind the RSS running such a large network of schools across the country was to “capture young Hindu minds and instill the ancient Hindu idea of invincibility”. Hindu India is the dominant people around the world, and the golden bird of Indian civilization was destroyed by thousands of years of slavery, first at the hands of Muslims, then at the hands of Muslims. Ta. [Christian] colonial powers.”
He said the Modi government had given Hindu nationalists “the best chance to restore the ancient glory of global Hindu supremacy”.
“If you instill such ideas in the minds of children, they will become furiously angry against Muslims and Christians. They are always trying to create a state of paranoia in the Hindu mind that they are conspirators,” he said.
