The Hindu: One story, two sides
http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/one-story-two-sides/article5124147.ece
School textbooks in India and Pakistan present divergent views on
historical events. The History Project attempts a truce.
Here are two versions of the same sequence of events.
One: In 1947, when Hari Singh, the ruler of Kashmir, opted to stay
independent, Pakistani armed intruders from Pakistan attacked Kashmir. Hari
Singh then signed an agreement to join India, and the Indian army was sent
in to defend Kashmir.
Two: Hari Singh started a brutal campaign to drive out Muslims from
Kashmir. Over 200,000 people in the princely State, supported by the
tribesmen of the Northwest Frontier Province, were successful in liberating
a large area of Kashmir from the Maharaja’s control. So Hari Singh was
forced to turn to India for help and in return acceded to India.
The first version is from a history textbook in India; the second from a
history textbook in Pakistan. As a result, two groups of children are
growing up with different ideas about a shared past.
In school, we learn that History isn’t like Maths. It isn’t a ‘scoring
subject’. A two plus two will yield the same result all over the world, but
history is subjective. It’s written by people, after all. People are
subjective too; people find it difficult to not pick sides, a fact borne
out by those history textbooks of India and Pakistan.
In a way, this conflict led to a book that illuminates the biases and
subjectivity inherent in history. The History Project — launched on April
30 — was born at the Seeds of Peace, an annual camp for teenagers from
countries in conflict, held at Maine, in the U.S. Feruzan Mehta, then
director of Seeds of Peace-India, came up with the idea in 2005. Six years
later, The History Project was founded by three young Pakistanis: Qasim
Aslam, Ayyaz Ahmad and Zoya Siddiqui. They brought together a team of
editors and volunteers from both countries to produce the Project’s first
history textbook.
The key to the project was the recurring arguments over history during the
camps. “A Pakistani kid and an Indian kid would argue about the same
event,” says Ahmad, “without realising that they had been taught different
versions. So, we decided to put both sides together in one volume. The idea
was dormant for a few years, until we decided to take it up again in 2011.”
The target audience was 12-14 year olds and, to make it appealing to them,
Zoya Siddiqui was brought on board to add a bit of colour to the text.
Today, the final product takes the form of a book that puts “these
different (often opposite) historical narratives side by side and augments
them through illustrations (that have their own concept narrative flowing
through them).” For example, the Indian and Pakistani textbooks are divided
on the issue of Bengal’s partition in 1905. While Indian textbooks claim
that the real reason for the division was to curb the rising tide of Indian
nationalism, their Pakistani counterparts accept the administrative
explanations cited by the British. Indian textbooks go on to describe the
anti-Partition movement as one in which both Hindus and Muslims marched
side by side, while Pakistani textbooks say that only Hindus participated
in the movement.
The History Project was compiled using nine Pakistani and three Indian
history textbooks that are part of the high school curriculum in both
countries. It encompasses 16 salient events beginning with the1857 War
(when the divide between Hindus and Muslims first became prominent) and
ending with the Partition in 1947. This is not a forced merging of texts;
neither are the narratives undermined in any way. What it does is simply to
put the accounts from Indian and Pakistani history books side by side, and
let the reader spot the difference. The very act of juxtaposing divergent
narratives of one event highlights the disparities and immediately suggests
that there might be an alternative perspective. This opens up the
possibility of dialogue that can both question and critique the existing
narrative, so far regarded by both sides as the unquestionable and final
truth.
The natural question on this side of the border is: Why only three Indian
textbooks? Doesn't that limit the perspective or narrow it down? Noorzadeh
Raza, one of the editors, says that while they wanted to give both
narratives equal importance, one of the major challenges the team faced was
the difficulty in accessing Indian history textbooks. “Another was the fact
that some events are present in textbooks on one side of the border but
have been excluded in the other. The Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930,
for example, is not mentioned in most Pakistani textbooks.”
It’s been a while since the book’s launch in April. In the last few months,
the History Project has been presented to school students and teachers on
both sides of the border. While the editorial team admits that it’s still
hard to say how it’s doing as a hi
