#dnaEdit: Unedifying pedagogy

Will Indian education now be guided by Dinanath Batra’s vision? If Gujarat is any pointer the improbable could well be around the corner. No longer a little-known RSS pracharak, Batra is the man whose antediluvian, restricted world view — in which the fundamentals of science, history and reason are redefined to accommodate mythology and Bharatiya ‘sanskriti’ — is being offered as lesson to government school students in Gujarat.

So, Gujarat school children are now reading books that proffer the following — stem cell technology should be credited not to the Americans but to the birth of the Kauravas; that ‘gau seva’ can help a childless couple; that Indians are ‘rotis’ cooked right, not undercooked like the English or overcooked like “Negroes”; that Indian culture is not drawn from different regions. And all of this — illustrated through anecdotes of Rishi Vyas and Gandhari, ancient kings, tales of heroes and fragments of speeches from the likes of Dr S Radhakrishnan — is but a small sampling.

It would be laughable were it not so unutterably tragic. Batra, who heads the Shiksha Bachao Andolan and is a key member of the RSS education wing, Vidya Bharati, is unapologetic about his blatantly chauvinistic and racist views. And much as we’d like to dismiss him to the margins, the fact is that he posits a serious threat to any rational debate. He is the man, after all, whose mere objections saw Penguin pulp Wendy Doniger’s book on Hinduism, Aleph withdraw a title by the author and Orient Blackswan set aside a book on communalism (the last not even for the asking). 

Eight books, written by Batra several years ago, were resurrected by the Gujarat government this March and prescribed as supplementary reading across 42,000 schools. All eight carry forewords by then Chief Minister and now Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A ninth book, Tejomay Bharat, is being distributed along with the eight.

Determined to overhaul the education system, the 85-year-old is delighted at the attention he is receiving. It suits his purpose, he told a reporter before going on to say that he would like the entire country to be saffronised as “saffronisation means renunciation and service”.

 The Indian government, it seems, agrees with Batra’s fantasy versions where fiction and mythology merge seamlessly with fact. That it is coloured with racism and pejorative terms like Negro that have been excised from the global lexicon is of little consequence — one story, Courageous Gurudev Singh, narrates how the Indian hero and the pilot stops a “Negro” from escaping from a plane and trusses him up like “tied buffalo”.

All of it is offensive and leading students up a dangerous path towards misguided learning. It has no place in any school, in any book that passes itself off as a text for education. Exposing children in Gujarat to this senselessness, so at odds with the modern, aspirational Indians looking to take their places in a global environment of learning and professional work,  is doing a disservice to them. 

And if Batra has his way, the entire country would follow suit. Amongst other things, he would reportedly like a ban on foreign languages in schools and a call centre to inculcate Indian values. He has already sent his proposals to human resource development minister Smriti Irani and is awaiting her response. Well, so are we.