They’re after the school curriculum again…
Well this came as a shock. How had I managed to miss it until now? And is there never going to be an end to this kind of nonsense?
The State Board of Education, California, is currently engaged in approving the history/social science textbooks for grades six to eight in schools, an exercise undertaken periodically. The Hindu Education Foundation and the Vedic Foundation (based in the U.S.) have used the occasion to push through “corrections” in the textbooks approved. Shiva Bajpai, who constituted the one-member ad hoc committee set up by the Board, succeeded in getting virtually all the changes requested by these organisations incorporated into the textbooks. Professor Emeritus at California State University, Northridge, and a Hindutva-leaning adviser to the Board, Bajpai was proposed as expert by the Vedic Foundation. That the Hindutva groups have not had a walkover is thanks to the vigilance and commitment of the many academics involved in Indian studies all over the world.
Here we go again. And again, and again, and again.
Intervention by Professors Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer in the form of a letter, signed by 50 other scholars, presented at a public hearing on November 9, resulted in the Board reversing its initial approval of the pro-Hindutva changes. Prof. Witzel is a well-known Indologist and has often taken up the cudgels against Hindutva ideologues such as David Frawley, N.S. Rajaram and Konrad Elst in the West. Witzel’s letter, endorsed among others by renowned Indian historians Romila Thapar, D.N. Jha and Shereen Ratnagar, to Ruth Green, President, State Board of Education, California, on behalf of “world specialists on ancient India”, voicing “mainstream academic opinion in India, Pakistan, the United States, Europe, Australia, Taiwan and Japan” on the issue, is now part of a concerted campaign encompassing well-known scholars and hundreds of teachers and parents in California.
Well good luck to them, and if B&W can help them at all, perhaps by drawing attention to the subject – it will, that’s what. I’ve emailed PZ; that’s a start.
Asserting that “the proposed revisions are not of a scholarly, but of a religious-political nature and are primarily promoted by Hindutva supporters and non-specialist academics writing about issues far outside their areas of expertise”, the scholars have called on the Board to “reject the demands by nationalist Hindu (Hindutva) groups”. From India, 12 historians have written to the CC to reject the changes proposed by the RSS-linked organisations in the U.S…Frantic mobilisation…in support of the changes suggested by the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu Education Foundation, and the pressure of a host of organisations that constitute the `parivar’ in the U.S. resulted in many of the proposed changes in textbooks getting the approval despite scholarly opinion being heavily weighted against it…Of the total 156 edits requested, the CC accepted 97 that conformed to what the Hindutva organisations had proposed.
Read the whole thing. I want to keep quoting and quoting, but there’s such a thing as copyright – so read it. It’s amazing stuff – also all too familiar.
The moves by the Hindu Right in the U.S. are no flash in the pan. The web sites of two of the organisations spearheading the Hindutva campaign – the Hindu Education Foundation and the Vedic Foundation – expressly state the revision of school textbooks in the U.S. as part of their political agenda. They regularly “interact” with State Education Committees that define school curriculum…
Oh, gawd…here we really do go again. Well – once more unto the breach, dear friends. Tell everyone you know.
Are these the same clowns who brought out that “Forbidden Archaelogy” rubbish years ago?
And will they get Steve Fuller to defend them if it goes to court?
There’s kind of a sticky issue here because to my knowledge (admittedly non-expert) there really is a legitimate controversy over what form the Indo-Aryan migration took.
The old view that the Indo-Aryans were the conqeurors of Northern India isn’t as widely held as it used to be, and I think a lot of mainstream scholars now posit that it was more a peaceful migration of small bands of nomads who brought with them their Indo-European language and bronze-age inventions like the chariot, but because of their numbers didn’t leave much of a trace in the gene pool.
Radical nationalists ignore these subtleties and claim either you’re a Nazi supremacist whose mighty blond-haired, blue-eyed ancestors conquered and civilized the savages of the Indus, or you agree that Hindu civilization existed a hundred trillion years before the Big Bang and Sanskrit is the most perfect language ever.
Let them.
It’s like the FSM but better, because they are absolutely serious.
I want them to get more and more media exposure.
I want them to start duking it out with IDots and other creationists.
Maybe THEN the numbskulls in this country will get the picture.
About 25 years ago in the Reference Library of Aberdeen Libraries, I came across a world history book. It was late Victorian and the author had clearly no time for tiresome things like Lyle’s of Darwin’s theories or evidence. The book took the christian bible as an infallible source. I read soem of it fascinated that anyone could write or get published such nonsense (and soemwhat agog that this was actually filed under the History section). I then came across an offensive passage.
To paraphrase, Noah’s three sons spilt up to repopulate the Earth. One, the most industrious went west to found the white people’s. The second, a lazy fellow went east to found the Asian/Asiatic peoples and the laziest one of all went south to found the African people. No mention of the origin of the peoples of America and Australasia. Maybe they don’t exist as the bible doesn’t mention them. As I am not a scholar of those times, I do not know if this was the official doctrine or how widespread this was.
To turn back to what we all know, and bear with me, the christians abolished slavery. No not quite right, certain non-mainstream christians were at the forefront of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire of the middle nineteenth century. Mainstream christianity backed slavery for several hundred years.
Ordinary working and middle class urban and rural people often helpded runaways long before the above movement.
In the West Indies in the 18th century, even Quakers were slave owners – see the life of Ouladah Equiano.
Also slavery was abolished in France and its territories by the rationalists of the French Revolution in 1795 with apologies to the former slaves for the delay in this as they had been busy on other things – see Mark Steel’s Vive la Revolution!
The point is that (I know it’s obvious) that religion distorts the truth to its own advantage.