By Deepika Sarma
On 14th July, California’s Board of Education met to approve the new framework for history textbooks, over which a bitter battle has been fought for months. For the sections on Indian history, a lobby of Hindu groups, including the Hindu American Foundation and the Uberoi Foundation, have been trying to introduce edits that are factually inaccurate, Islamophobic, and play down the role of caste and patriarchy in India’s history. Opposing this saffronisation is South Asian Histories For All (SAHFA), a coalition of groups across religion, caste, nationality and gender, fighting to ensure that the representation of Indian history in American school textbooks isn’t a sanitised one that erases or misrepresents the identities of several groups.
Among the many things the Hindu lobby was pushing for was the erasing of the term “Dalit”, asserting that the caste system promoted social stability and didn’t have its foundations in Hinduism; omitting mention of Sikhism’s opposition to casteism right at its origin; removing references to India having been a patriarchal society; including an out-of-context reference linking Islam with slavery in the Middle East, and renaming the Indus Valley Civilisation “Saraswati”. (Head here to read more about the edits.)
On 19th May 2016, the Board of Education held the last of two public hearings before its Instructional Quality Commission to decide on the revisions to the framework. Several showed up to attend and many from both sides gave their testimonials on what the suggested edits would mean to them. Among other things, the board denied the Hindu lobby’s efforts to have the term “Dalit” erased. (More on that here.) SAHFA has pointed out that the very process by which these hearing were conducted was unfair:
https://twitter.com/DesiHistory4All/status/754054855396880385
But it wasn’t just Indian history that was contested before the California Board of Education. Ethnic studies, Korean comfort women (women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army during World War II), Filipino-American, and LGBT histories were also considered before the board.
https://twitter.com/DesiHistory4All/status/753688386745937920
Moving on from this, SAHFA says it will “participate in the process of reviewing the new textbooks, and work to ensure that teachers have rich and diverse educational materials that will support their classroom experience.”