Hasina Bhanu was put on the D-Voter or Doubtful Voter list for the first time in 1997. A resident of Assam, she had come under suspicion as a “foreigner” or an infiltrator, whose unenviable status disqualified her for that basic right of all citizens — her vote. After running from pillar to post with documentation that showed her family’s generational roots in India, Bhanu would finally be put off the list nearly two decades later, in 2016. But her relief was short-lived. Five years later, she would again be labelled a foreigner and put in a detention camp in Tezpur Jail, where she would spend two nerve-wracking months before being released. Despite her troubles and the anxiety that refuses to leave Bhanu now, not all citizens are as lucky as her. In her book, Desher Manush (The People of Our Country), part of Itihashe Hatekhori, a series of history books in Bengali meant for children between 12 and 14 years of age, Tista Das, assistant professor, Bankura University, writes of the idea of citizenship that has been formulated and remade since the time of Independence and the many ways it can disenfranchise citizens like Bhanu of their rights. Das writes lucidly of the Citizenship Act of 1955 and the amendments that it has undergone and how it has coloured our understanding of “illegal” immigrants, refugees or “foreigners”, foregrounding a discussion on belonging, migration and statelessness in a rich, conversational narrative. “Children, at least, many of them, understand laws as something that brings justice. That the legal and the political work together to complicate the scenario was difficult but essential to put forward. The National Register of Citizens (NRC)-Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) times made this project feel urgent,” says Das. Das’ book is one of the three volumes in the series born of the project ‘Revisiting the Craft of History Writing for Children’ (2022) by Institute of Development Studies Kolkata (IDSK) and funded by the German political foundation, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (RLS). The other two books in the series include Desher Bhasha (The Languages of Our Country) by Debarati Bagchi and Deshbhaag (Partition) by Anwesha Sengupta. Illustrated by Ranjit and Sirajuddaulah Chitrakar, Patachitra artists from West Bengal’s Pingla village, the books introduce children to contentious issues of rights, borders and belonging that have been at the centre of India’s political life in recent years. Loosely translated, the Bengali word “haatekhori” implies initiation, a rite of passage into knowledge and awareness. Yet, it was the obfuscation of history and the polarisation in the country that first sowed the seeds of the series. “The way history was invoked and misinterpreted repeatedly to justify NRC-CAA by the people in power, the invocation of history on social media and the rise of a group of 'historians' with no disciplinary training who produced linear, celebratory, majoritarian version of India's past alarmed us. The government’s intervention and meddling with school history textbooks, too, shaped this attempt,” says Sengupta, assistant professor of History, Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata. Alongside, Bagchi, senior research fellow, Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies, New Delhi, says, they also felt the need to address a lacuna in contemporary vernacular writings on history. “We also noticed that there was a dearth of alternative or popular history books for children in Bengali. Children's perception of writing, reading, and learning history was predominantly restricted to the school textbook approach which has its own limitations,” she says. The widespread critical appreciation of the books have now paved the way for English and Assamese translations (by Arunava Sinha and Arup Kalita, respectively) with a Marathi translation in the offing. In Bagchi's Desher Bhasha, which focuses on the partition of Bengal, the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 and Assam’s ethnic conflicts, comes to life. Through contemporary and historical examples, Bagchi shows how language can become both a tool of liberation and a weapon of oppression when it intersects with complicated issues of caste, class or community. “The issue of language as a marker of identity politics appeared relatively abstract to communicate. Although it is part of a child's everyday, the question of hierarchy and power in terms of language was more difficult to convey lucidly. The power dynamics between the rich and the poor is more of a common sense for a child than the one between a Calcutta Bengali and a district Bengali or an Assamese and a Bodo person,” says Bagchi, whose account deliberates on the pressure to conform to an overarching national identity and how it invisibilises non-mainstream languages and dialects. The complications of a mainstream narrative also lies at the heart of Sengupta’s exploration of Partition. When she was writing the book, Sengupta’s main concern had been on how to make the horrors of the violence tangible to children without drawing them into its goriness or without making her book appear to be a response to right-wing propaganda. In the end, her focus was on “providing an accessible yet nuanced narrative of Partition”. When the project was conceived, it was with the idea of making history accessible to children, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, and to encourage them to think beyond textbooks. While limited print copies were circulated in government schools, libraries and NGOs and e-copies made available for wider dissemination, the three historians also held interactive sessions with children from a wide spectrum of backgrounds. While most participants responded to notions of borders and nationality with conventional mainstream symbols, some of the most heartwarming responses came when they were asked to convey their ideas of who constituted the people of the country. Farmers and labourers, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs stood shoulder to shoulder in harmony in drawings that the children turned in. “The books have tried to initiate a process of unlearning; to see the nation in fragments and to open up and tease out newer meanings of state-imposed borders and boundaries. One has to begin somewhere. And this is where we began,” says Das, of what remains an ongoing series.
