California Textbooks - 2

[acharya]

http://www.siliconeer.com/past_issues/20...y2006.html

History Hungama:
The California Textbook Debate - By Sunaina Maira and Raja Swamy
Who would have thought that the merits of the Aryan Migration Theory would be hotly debated in California? As bemused Americans look on, the acrimonious arguments go on, with battle lines sharply drawn. While the battle has been portrayed in some of the media as arguments between Hindu parents and U.S. scholars, there is much more than meets the eye, write Sunaina Maira and Raja Swamy.

The Tail Wagging the Dog:
Behind the Facade of Hindu Parents

The folks crying foul over the depiction of Hindus and India in California textbooks will have you believe that it’s a grassroots protest of Hindu parents who don’t want their kids to feel bad about being Hindus in school.

To be sure, parents are part of the protest, but all the heavy lifting is being done by the Hindu Education Fund, the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu American Foundation.

So who are they?

The Hindu Education Fund is affiliated with the Hindu Swayamsewak Sangh, an American chapter of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, as HEF admitted to the Wall Street Journal.

The Vedic Foundation, part of Barsana Dham based in Austin, Texas, works closely with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America and hosts numerous events, including the Dharma Sansad, attended by top RSS functionaries. Hindu Students Council, a VHPA project, holds annual camps at this location.

The foundation has its distinctive take of history. In a curious volume issued by its spiritual leader titled “The True History and the True Religion of India,” theology is so seamlessly woven into history that you can’t tell where theology ends and the history begins. “The history of Bharatvarsh (which is now called India) is the description of the timeless glory of the Divine dignitaries.”* The author claims that the history of India is 155.521972 trillion years. (In case you didn’t know, that turns archeological evidence on its head, with humans predating dinosaurs.)

It gets weirder. In another page the Web site informs: “Bhagwan Ram lived on the earth for eleven thousand years.”** The thought of these folks being arbiters of what kind of Indian history will be taught in California is—to put it mildly—not entirely reassuring.

The Hindu American Foundation is a creation of the RSS-front organization Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America through its star product Mihir Meghani, who co-founded the Hindu Students Council as a student at the University of Michigan. Meghani’s own views of minority rights, available on the BJP’s official Web site deserves mention: “The future of Bharat is set. Hindutva is here to stay. It is up to the Muslims whether they will be included in the new nationalistic spirit of Bharat. It is up to the government and the Muslim leadership whether they wish to increase Hindu furor or work with the Hindu leadership to show that Muslims and the government will consider Hindu sentiments. The era of one-way compromise of Hindus is over, for from now on, secularism must mean that all parties must compromise.”***

Presenting the argument of these organizations as a “grassroots,” “community” protest begs the question: Why are they shy about their Indian RSS affiliation?

Is it because the attempt by RSS-supported organizations to rewrite Indian school textbooks was such a disaster that it drew a nearly unanimous outcry from the Indian press and scholars?

*http://www.thevedicfoundation.org/bhartiya_history/index.html
**http://www.thevedicfoundation.org/do_you_know/2.html
*** Hindutva: The Great Nationalist Ideology, Mihir Meghani, http://bjp.org/history/htvintro-mm.html

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There has been such a hullabaloo over proposed changes in California history textbooks that even mainstream U.S. newspapers are beginning to notice. So what’s the fuss all about?

California state textbooks come up for review every six years. This year, the sixth-grade history and social science texts are under review, and a controversy has arisen over the sections relating to ancient Indian history. Most of these textbooks are inadequate for a number of reasons and have many errors on Indian history. Taking advantage of this inadequacy, two groups: Vedic Foundation and Hindu Education Foundation, backed by the Hindu American Foundation— all with demonstrable ideological and organizational links to Hindu supremacist organizations – inserted themselves into the revision process. But instead of just making corrections to erroneous texts, the VF-HEF are pushing through changes that reflect their supremacist and chauvinistic political agendas, seeking to equate the history of India with the history of Hinduism, and the living, diverse religion of Hinduism with a Brahmanical, Vedic religion frozen in time for thousands of years.
The Tail Wagging the Dog:
Behind the Facade of Hindu Parents

The folks crying foul over the depiction of Hindus and India in California textbooks will have you believe that it’s a grassroots protest of Hindu parents who don’t want their kids to feel bad about being Hindus in school.

To be sure, parents are part of the protest, but all the heavy lifting is being done by the Hindu Education Fund, the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu American Foundation.

So who are they?

The Hindu Education Fund is affiliated with the Hindu Swayamsewak Sangh, an American chapter of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, as HEF admitted to the Wall Street Journal.

The Vedic Foundation, part of Barsana Dham based in Austin, Texas, works closely with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America and hosts numerous events, including the Dharma Sansad, attended by top RSS functionaries. Hindu Students Council, a VHPA project, holds annual camps at this location.

The foundation has its distinctive take of history. In a curious volume issued by its spiritual leader titled “The True History and the True Religion of India,” theology is so seamlessly woven into history that you can’t tell where theology ends and the history begins. “The history of Bharatvarsh (which is now called India) is the description of the timeless glory of the Divine dignitaries.”* The author claims that the history of India is 155.521972 trillion years. (In case you didn’t know, that turns archeological evidence on its head, with humans predating dinosaurs.)

It gets weirder. In another page the Web site informs: “Bhagwan Ram lived on the earth for eleven thousand years.”** The thought of these folks being arbiters of what kind of Indian history will be taught in California is—to put it mildly—not entirely reassuring.

The Hindu American Foundation is a creation of the RSS-front organization Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America through its star product Mihir Meghani, who co-founded the Hindu Students Council as a student at the University of Michigan. Meghani’s own views of minority rights, available on the BJP’s official Web site deserves mention: “The future of Bharat is set. Hindutva is here to stay. It is up to the Muslims whether they will be included in the new nationalistic spirit of Bharat. It is up to the government and the Muslim leadership whether they wish to increase Hindu furor or work with the Hindu leadership to show that Muslims and the government will consider Hindu sentiments. The era of one-way compromise of Hindus is over, for from now on, secularism must mean that all parties must compromise.”***

Presenting the argument of these organizations as a “grassroots,” “community” protest begs the question: Why are they shy about their Indian RSS affiliation?

Is it because the attempt by RSS-supported organizations to rewrite Indian school textbooks was such a disaster that it drew a nearly unanimous outcry from the Indian press and scholars?

*http://www.thevedicfoundation.org/bhartiya_history/index.html
**http://www.thevedicfoundation.org/do_you_know/2.html
*** Hindutva: The Great Nationalist Ideology, Mihir Meghani, http://bjp.org/history/htvintro-mm.html
Many community groups, such as Friends of South Asia and Coalition Against Communalism, as well as a whole host of faculty members have opposed this attempt to inject ideological, sectarian changes in textbooks. The particularly problematic changes are concentrated largely on three issues:

Promotion of a narrow and sectarian viewpoint within Hinduism as representing the entire religion. According to the edits of HEF/VF, Hinduism is described as a homogenous, monotheistic, brahmanical and revealed religion. This description subverts the pluralistic traditions and diverse viewpoints and attempts to promote only one sectarian viewpoint.

Sanitization of caste and gender inequalities in ancient and present-day India, thus silencing a large number of peoples’ struggles against injustice and oppression. Some of the proposed edits attempt to invalidate the very identity and existence of lower caste “untouchables” (Dalits) in India.

The ahistorical notion that the speakers of the Indo-European languages (Aryans) in ancient India were indigenous to India instead of the currently accepted historical research that gives them a Central Asian origin. The legitimization of this thesis is tied, not to any differing scholarly viewpoint, but simply to a wider contemporary Hindu nationalist political agenda of proving that while Hindus were “indigenous”, the Christians and Muslims who arrived in India later were “invaders.”

As things stand now, the HEF and VF have managed to get the Curriculum Commission to agree to a large number of their suggested changes in alignment with their Hindu nationalist/supremacist ideology know as Hindutva.

The only opposition they faced was a last minute organizing by some Indologists (M. Witzel from Harvard, Stanley Wolpert from UCLA and J. Heitzman from UC Davis with around 50 other scholars supporting them, (http://www.people.fas.harvar
d.edu/~witzel/witzelletter.pdf) and a faculty letter from over 130 South Asian Studies experts and South Asian professors at universities. While these interventions did help prevent the inclusion of many incorrect and potentially harmful suggestions, many other problematic Hindutva changes were accepted by the Curriculum Commission on Dec 2, 2005.

Groups such as Friends of South Asia and Coalition Against Communalism are dismayed by the acceptance of these “edits” by the Curriculum Commission and are petitioning the State Board to reject them. In addition to the factual inaccuracies of the VF-HEF edits, they are also petitioning the State Board to reject the changes approved by the Curriculum Commission on procedural and legal grounds. First, the Curriculum Commission is an advisory body to the State Board, and had been instructed by the board to accept only changes that reflected “factual accuracy,” but chose to ignore the mandate. Second, the Curriculum Commission violated the legally binding California Education Code requirement that sectarian viewpoints not be a part of the curriculum taught in schools. On Jan. 12, the Board announced the appointment of a sub-committee to specifically investigate whether the Curriculum Commission followed its directives in making the recommendations.
Horseplay: Playing Fast and Loose with Archeology

S. Rajaram and paleographist Natwar Jha created a media sensation in 2000 with their book “The Deciphered Indus Script.” Rajaram claimed that that their effort represented “the most important breakthrough of our time in the history of Indian history a culture.”

Rajaram, a retired U.S. engineering professor with no training in history or archaeology, claimed to have deciphered the Indus Valley script, a task that has confounded experts ever since the civilization was discovered.

Evidence of Rajaram’s historical research is virtually nonexistent; his writings follow the classic Hindutva mold and virulently attack the Hindutva Enemies List—Christian missionaries, Marxist academics, leftist politicians, Indian Muslims, and glorified the destruction of the Babri Mosque in 1992.

He claimed the Indus Valley was the home of the Rig Veda, Greek and Babylonian mathematics, all alphabetical scripts, and his claims have become a cause celebre for Hindutva followers.

However, experts found his claims bogus, and Harvard experts Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer dismissed the work as a fraud in an article for the Indian magazine Frontline.

Rajaram claimed an Indus seal is supposed to read, in late Vedic Sanskrit: “Arko haas’va, Sun indeed like the horse [sic],” a reference to the Yajurveda. According to Rajaram, it is accompanied by a picture of a horse. But this picture is found on a broken seal, where the front part of the “horse” is missing, and only the hindquarters of a typical “unicorn” bull are visible. The very break line of the seal, fuzzily reproduced from a clear original, is reconstructed by Rajaram as the neck and head of a horse and made “visible” in an added “artist’s impression.”

There are in fact two seals of that type. Both are broken and without the “horse’s” neck and head that have been liberally supplied by “computer enhancement” (as Rajaram privately admitted later on).

“What kind of motive drives expatriate writers such as a Rajaram to wildly imagine or even to invent their evidence?” asked Witzel. “Just as the infamous British Piltdown man (this 1912 hoax tried to establish the ‘missing link’ between ape and man), this Piltdown horse is composed of fake parts, put together with the same intention: to show something that simply is not there but is wished for, and, therefore, manufactured.

“Why a horse? Horses are badly needed in the Indus Civilisation, as zoology and archaeology tell us they were not found in South Asia then. Domesticated horses, animals of the northern steppes, were imported into South Asia (and Mesopotamia) only early in the second millennium bce (same as BC). The first archaeologically-attested bones come from the plains below Bolan Pass (in what’s now west-central Pakistan), at 1700 bce, 200 years after the Indus Civilisation disintegrated.” No horse, no Aryans in Harappa.

The broader Hindutva agenda is clear—the chilling subtext of this obsession with “indigenous” origin of Aryans is to be able to nurse the sectarian illusion that Hindus alone are the original and bonafide inhabitants of India, and people of other faiths have lesser legitimacy.
One of the claims of the HEF and VF in their proposed middle school textbook “edits,” is that the Aryan Invasion/Migration Theory is invalidated by current genetics research. Citing a 1999 scientific paper that focused on the question of the original migration of modern humans from Africa some 50,000 years ago, the HEF and VF claimed that the Aryan Invasion Theory was conclusively disproved. The question of why this claim is so important to the HEF and VF is worth exploring in its political context, but first let us take this claim at face value, to show that it does not even stand the test of scientific validity. First, the study in question focused on the question of the original human migration out of Africa around 60,000 years ago. DNA evidence tends to become unwieldy as the length of time in question decreases — huge error bars for instance for the Aryan migration period of 1,500 BCE render estimates impossible. Genetics studies are for the most part inconclusive even though the vast majority of the evidence supports the Aryan Influx Theory. For a detailed summary of some current papers in Archeogenetics pertinent to this issue, please check out http://www.friendsofsouthasia.org/text
book/Archaeogenetics_Key_Studies.html.

By selectively citing one study, the HEF and VF wanted to declare victory and get their claims codified in textbooks for sixth grade students. When the scientific “evidence” is shown to be false the HEF and VF claim that scholars whose research invalidates their claims have motives against Hinduism. Thus they assert that their struggle to overturn current research is part of a struggle by an aggrieved minority community in the U.S. to achieve respect. The shrill anti-intellectual rhetoric of the HEF and VF against individual scholars in the U.S. and India is identical to that meted out to Indian and other scholars by the Sangh Parivar in India. By labeling the Aryan Invasion/Migration theory as racist the HEF and VF, like their counterparts in the Sangh Parivar, deliberately confuse the colonial era versions of the Aryan invasion theory, such as that attributed famously to Max Muller, with the current scholarship on the issue. The available body of research on the Aryan invasion/migration theory is not just massive – it spans more than two-dozen fields of study and constitutes a far more complex range of debates and ideas than those attributed to Max Muller and other colonial historians, Orientalists and Indologists. As for Max Muller’s racial views of the Aryan invasion, historians like Romila Thapar and D.N. Jha have critiqued these long discredited positions decades ago. By making Max Muller into a straw man, the HEF and VF can justify their refusal to accept the mountain of evidence spanning several fields of research and study that points to a Central Asian origin to the Indo Aryans.

Modus Operandi
Antipathy to scholarship is disguised as “community outrage” as if the HEF and VF represent an oppressed minority. This strategy is based on an inversion of the Sangh Parivar’s usual posture of arrogance and contempt towards minorities in India. In order to facilitate this posture’s effectiveness, a slick PR organization called the Hindu American Foundation supports the HEF and VF’s textbook efforts.

While HAF founder Mihir Meghani advises Muslims in India that “Hindutva is here to stay, it is up to the Muslims whether they will be included in the new nationalistic spirit of Bharat,” (See sidebar: The Tail Wagging the Dog), HAF aids the HEF and VF in casting the campaign to rewrite textbooks as an effort to promote Hindu minority rights in the U.S. This inversion reveals the insidious tendency of the Sangh Parivar to exploit anti-racist language to further its goals. It wears the garb of an aggrieved minority in order to appease the multi-culturalist sentiments of the wider American public who are generally oblivious to the politics of Hindutva in the U.S. or in India. Most well-meaning Indians and other Americans would not want to side with white academics against aggrieved Hindus, a sentiment exploited by the HEF and VF. As if this were not enough, these organizations also mimic the legendary viciousness of the Sangh Parivar’s tactics.
Some of the HEF’s advisors have been at the forefront of a vicious and slanderous campaign against Dr. Michael Witzel, including a petition directed to Harvard University aiming to discredit him by accusing him of being an “Aryan Supremacist,” and a “creationist,” accusations that could in reality more aptly describe the content they wish to impose on sixth-graders with their current campaign to rewrite California’s textbooks. Such malicious tactics are not new to the Hindutva movement. A few years ago these same U.S. based RSS organizations attempted (and failed) to block the appointment of the world renowned historian Dr. Romila Thapar to the Kluge Chair at the Library of Congress, using similar smear tactics accusing her of “cultural genocide,” being “anti-Hindu” and so on. The head of the RSS even called for her arrest.

S. Kalyanaraman, advisor to the HEF refers to the Indo-Eurasian Research run by Michael Witzel as “a Communist-leaning political list better known for its uncritical beliefs in myths like Aryan Invasion and its negation of historical facts..” This advisor to the HEF also believes that “it is time to attack the ‘secular’. It is a dirty word, a dirty system and should be used as a word of abuse against anyone who does not adhere to Sanatana Dharma…I think secularism should be deemed a negation of Dharma, anti-Dharma, a word of abuse and hence rejected altogether.”
Dalits Step in the Debate
Such contradictions between stated antipathy towards minority rights in India and as champions of minority rights in the U.S. do not seem to bother the HEF and VF. Yet when Dalit groups intervened and voiced their strong objections to the California State Board of Education, the HEF and VF switched their tunes to more-familiar strains: outright vilification of Dalits on Hindutva Internet forums and Web sites ranging from dismissal of the very term Dalit, to vitriol that only confirms the deep-rooted anti-Dalit orientation of the Hindutva movement.

The Dalit Web Site That Wasn’t

The most recent outrage perpetrated by the Hindutva movement in response to their inability to steamroll their way into sixth grade textbooks is a novelty in itself. On Dec. 19 a Web site called dalithumanrights.com was registered. Steve Farmer, one of the academics at the heart of the effort to stop the HEF and VF edits, received a letter from someone claiming to be sympathetic to his views that directed him to the Web site. The Web site itself looked quite innocuous, visually filled with stories about atrocities against Dalits. However the absence of identification information or a contact number on the Web site was odd. When asked about this omission, the anonymous organizers of this site responded with a note about fearing persecution.

Interspersed among the stories were some items that seemed strangely out of place – there were pieces from the RSS mouthpiece The Organiser, for instance. Many of these stories reflected the views of the Hindutva movement with regard to the Aryan Invasion Theory, the arrest of the leader of Kanchi Mutt, and allegations against Christians. Stories titled “Dalits Pray For Sankaracharya’s Release”, “Sankaracharya’s Arrest: Dalit Hindu Peoples’ Sabha Condemns”, and “Conversions threaten a way of life.” hardly seem to be titles to offerings on any legitimate Dalit Web site.

A quick Internet search on the domain dalithumanrights.com showed Dalithumanrights.com resides on a server with i.p. address 66.226.242.126. This server also hosts a large number of virulent Hindutva Web sites. These include: christianaggression.com & org, conversionwatch.org, crusadewatch.com & org, dharmaeducation.com & org, hindumediawatch.com & org, hindurenaissance.com & org, hindurenaissance.org, hindutva.org & com, hinduvigil.com, org, net, historyofjihad.org, islamreview.org, jesusreview.com & org, newsonterror.com. Many of these Web sites are registered to Rajiv Varma a Texas-based Hindutva activist under the name of an outfit called ‘Hinduworld, Inc.’

When this deception was exposed, stories from the RSS and related Web sites began disappearing from dalithumanrights.com. Cached copies are available.
Shiva Bajpai, the one academic historian trotted out by the Hindutva groups to push their case, claimed: “Dalit is a Marxist term and an ideology. It is not caste/class specific.”

Indeed, many of the textbook “edits” proposed by the HEF and VF center on erasing references to oppressive aspects of the caste system in ancient India. The HEF, for instance, wants this entire sentence deleted: “The caste system is just one example of how Hinduism was woven into the fabric of daily life in India.” This effort also included the removal of references to Dalits. The HEF suggested replacing the following sentence: “In modern India, these people are now called Dalits, and treating someone as an untouchable is a crime against the law.” with this one: “In modern India, treating someone as an untouchable is a crime against the law.” The Vedic Foundation goes even further by claiming in response to a sentence that reads: “Indian society divides itself into a complex structure of social classes based particularly on jobs. This class structure is called the caste system,” that the caste system no longer exists in modern India since the Indian Constitution guarantees the right to equality. The assertion that the caste system no longer exists is especially offensive given the persistence of systematic caste-based violence directed at Dalit communities throughout India.

If the desired erasure of Dalits and the cruel legacy of the caste system from history textbooks represents one type of violence, the hate-speech openly articulated by HEF members and their allies speaks volumes about the propensity for further levels of violence. S. Kalyanaraman, senior advisor to the HEF for example opines about Dalit Christians that: “These converts are not stupid, they are simply empowered by tainted money, the only way they could make a living and a very good one at that. In practice, few of them are employable to actually do a job of work.”

“Calling them ‘dalit’ is an insult to the entire legacy of dharma. It is being increasingly abused as a hate word by proselytizing groups for their nefarious purposes.”

According to this HEF advisor, “(Dalit International Solidarity Network) is a mullah-missionary-Marxist axis.”

Kalavai Venkat, who is listed as an author on the Web site ‘Voice of Dharma’ (a project of the ‘Hindu Mahasabha of America’ run by Vishal Agarwal) has been a fervent proponent of the Hindutva textbook rewrite effort. After the setback faced by the HEF and VF following the Dalit intervention in the textbook issue, Venkat engaged in anti-Dalit outbursts on a Hindutva forum that he moderates.

Kalavai Venkat: “It is also true that those who call themselves ‘Dalits’ are hate-mongers and racists. They never were oppressed themselves but received benefits of reservation due to vote-bank politics, whereby they deprived a meritorious student of his/her place. All ‘Dalit’ associations in universities/offices are parasitic”

Outrageous declarations of this kind promote a tyrannical and violent image of Brahmanical power, confirming that the Hindutva agenda remains fundamentally a Brahmanic project intent on the continuation of the subjugation of Dalits.

These sentiments are expressed by Jit Majumdar, a member of this forum, who opined:

“You depraved hate-monger, poisoned and caustic minds like yours deserve to be spat and trod upon. You are lowly ‘dalits’ because of your own depraved nature and character. Nobody else have to make you low. You creatures are natural scum with my shoe on your head,”

— Jit Majumder

The sheer crudeness on display above shows that behind the benign garb of ‘education’ lies a supremacist agenda that easily slips into uninhibited rage and hatred for Dalits.

One of the main successes of Hindutva mobilizations is reflected in the way in which the media has been covering this issue in an alarming manner – this “controversy” is consistently framed as a debate between some faculty (who are represented as white and non-Hindus) and a monolithic, aggrieved Hindu community. Posing the conflict along racial lines allows for a complete dismissal of genuine scholarship and the diversity of views within the community itself.

The HEF and VF’s entry into the textbook issue is cast as one impelled by the needs of Hindu students or the concerns of Hindu parents. There is no doubt that the instructional materials up for review in California contain problematic histories and need revision. Some of the statements and images in the textbooks are indeed Orientalist, and there are problematic representations of South Asian culture. But the efforts of the HEF and VF to take advantage of these discrepancies and launch a whole series of changes that have little to do with historical accuracy or the removal of biased representation has to be opposed. Their proposed changes in fact advance the biased and twisted worldview of Hindutva which sees all non-Hindus as outsiders and therefore less deserving of full rights as citizens in India. These proposed edits also erase Dalits from ancient India, whitewash the caste system and falsify the history of gender oppression. This issue is not only about what sixth grade American students will learn in California. It is also not about how well or badly ancient India appears to either students or their parents.

By reducing the study of history to a matter of cheery representations of the past, we fail to provide students with the critical tools necessary to recognize and act upon various forms of oppression in the present. The oppression of Dalits and women in India and South Asia is widespread and current. How are students to be equipped to deal with these contemporary oppressions when their history books, thanks to the HEF and VF, effectively erase Dalits, glorify the caste system and falsify the oppression of women in history textbooks? Is pride to be achieved at the cost of knowledge? And if so, pride in what?

- Sunaina Maira is associate professor of Asian American studies at the University of California at Davis and author of ‘Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City.’
Raja Swamy is a graduate student in the department of anthropology
at the University of Texas, Austin.