One story, two sides

SWATI DAFTUAR
SEPTEMBER 14, 2013 19:05 IST

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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.