The Hindu: One story, two sides
http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/one-story-two-sides/article512414…
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 history book or a reference text, they feel
that the response in both countries has been phenomenal. “Only after people
have read the book and absorbed some of the ideas in it will we be able to
understand how it’s doing as a historical text,” says Ahmad. “The fact
something of this sort even happened was a big surprise for most people.
Certainly, the idea had been there for quite some time and I believe that
people realised that there were discrepancies on both sides. Yet for
someone to go ahead and actually put the two side by side didn’t seem
likely.”
In April, Ahmad, Aslam and Siddiqui officially launched the book by
presenting it at four schools in Mumbai. They worked with kids from Std.
VIII-X. Ahmad says that while some students had not studied Indo-Pak
history, they easily grasped the fundamental concept of another side to the
story. In the following month, the book was introduced in schools in
Lahore. “There, I believe we were at a slight disadvantage, as our Indian
peers were not with us for the presentations due to visa issues. This, of
course, took some oomph out of the presentations but the kids we worked
with were extremely enthusiastic,” Ahmad continues. “The best thing about
working with kids on both sides was that, they weren’t politically correct
at all. So if they felt a certain way about an issue, we got to hear that.
For some people, this can be a bit difficult to digest, but it’s important
to realise that if 12-14-year-olds already have such strong feelings about
historical issues (often without having studied them at all), then there’s
something more fundamental at play here, which needs to be highlighted.”
What Ahmad refers to here is how young students are easily influenced and
often adopt ideas and beliefs without questioning them. This led the team
to examine the way history and historical accounts affect the shaping of an
entire generation.
Zoya Siddiqui, the illustrator, says that the book, surprisingly, hasn’t
faced any resistance in either Indian or Pakistani schools. “We’ve seen
shock, surprise, curiosity and even amusement, but not unwillingness to
learn. In fact, it’s safe to say that we’ve achieved our goal in initiating
a dialogue. There haven’t been any reactions. Rather, there have been
‘responses’, which is very positive.” Siddiqui’s illustrations,
characterised by the repeated appearance of a faceless man, furthers the
book’s message. “He is a visual depiction of that blurry edge that we, the
team, are walking on. He is doing precisely what we are doing; adopting and
illustrating both stances of history without propagating any answers. The
ambiguity of the faceless man helps raise questions, which is our purpose.”
If the book has triggered a response in children, it has incited an even
greater one in adults, both as appreciation and criticism. “We were aware
that this would happen, simply because the school is one of the major
agents of socialisation, where most ideas take shape. These ideas are
carried on as adults later,” says Siddiqui. To the founders, helping
children question and understand history seemed like “the right and
relevant starting point”. The project is also being viewed as a step
towards separating political and personal agendas from historical
narratives; an opportunity, still in a nascent stage, to re-examine what we
have always believed to be true.
Already having tackled a mammoth project, the team is contemplating and
bouncing around a host of other ideas, ranging from a look at famous
pre-Partition personalities to a post-Partition version of The History
Project. As a first and crucial step towards accepting and integrating
historical perspectives of two nations, The History Project has started
causing ripples of change that the founders hope will soon turn to waves.
Qasim Aslam can be contacted at qasim(a)thehistory-project.org
swatid45(a)gmail.com
Keywords: India-Pakistan history textbooks, Kashmir ruler Hari Singh, The
History Project, Seeds of Peace, Seeds of Peace-India.
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