“If they don’t read Shivaji they end up reading Genghis Khan,” the former Minister of State for Human Resource Development, Ram Shankar Katheria said at Lucknow University. Katheria also made it very clear that “there will be saffronisation of education and the country… if that is good for the nation”. This remark cannot be taken as an exception. One can, with full conviction, say that they are part of Hindutva’s design to create binaries — the staple diet of any extreme political ideology that feeds on adversarial social relations.
The minister was following a larger agenda. However, what has not been noticed in this context is his complete ignorance of the identity and history of Genghis Khan, the ruthless conqueror who stamped his authority over a large part of Central Asia and China in the 13th century. The minister apparently took the Mongolian warlord for a Muslim and set him up against Shivaji, the 17th century Maratha ruler who, to a great extent, has been appropriated by the Hindutva forces.
Genghis Khan was not only a ruthless ruler but also a destroyer of various Muslim powers and Islamic institutions across Transoxiana in the early 13th century.
He was a shamanic practitioner and his beliefs had a strong tinge of popular Buddhism —though the ways in which Buddhism influenced the Mongolian warlord have been contested at different levels. The political polemic of the minister silenced the fact that Muslim communities across Transoxiana suffered the most at the hands of Khan.
The minister’s rhetoric is a part of a project which promotes what Hindutva claims as the “real history”. With a long history of its own, this project has begun to increasingly romanticise the martial aspect of certain communities that are expected to join Hindutva given the changing social and political scenarios in different parts of the country. With a new agenda of inventing a martial India, the narratives of new textbooks revolve around combats and masculinity.
Such valourised/romanticised histories are part of the school curricula in BJP-ruled states: Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. What is worrying is that these textbooks have now become serious instruments for the proliferation of communal tensions in north India. Researches on violence in north India show that the new history textbooks play a major role in the construction of communal violence in many micro-regions in north Indian states.
Once textualised, Hindutva’s invented histories are popularised by various groups like the Akhil Bharatiya Ithihas Sankalan Yojana and Institute for Rewriting Indian History. Organisations under the aegis of RSS, like the Rashtra Sevika Samiti and Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas propagate such histories “for national resurrection”. Under the ex-HRD minister, Smriti Irani, the Hindutva brigade used research institutes like the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) for carrying out its agenda. The appointment of P. Sudarshana Rao — his only contribution to history remains the discovery of the “exact year of the Kurukshetra War” — as the chairman of ICHR was ridiculed by the international community of historians.
The attack on emperor Ashoka in Bappa Raval, the mouth piece of Rajasthan Vanavasi Kalyan Parishad, an RSS-afilliate body, is the latest in the same project. Ashoka is blamed for “turning the entire empire into a giant monastery for promoting Buddhism”. The article criticises “Buddhist monks for propagating seditious, senseless, anti-India ideas among their disciples”. Two things are to be noted here. Ashoka does not fit into Hindutva’s masculine idea that is replete with a sense of conquests and colonisation; he is seen as effeminate and de-masculinised.The depiction of Buddhism as “enemy” is far removed from the assertion of subaltern communities that resist caste violence by converting to Buddhism.
Empirically verifiable Indian history questions the logic of binaries and helps unravel the mysteries of the past. But the present political establishment wants to harp on an atmosphere of animosity which hate histories create; the generation that grows up reading such history will want to take “revenge”. It is difficult to say if the elevation of Prakash Javadekar as the new HRD minister would change the situation. We may see more saffronisation — perhaps in a more sophisticated and less boisterous manner.
