California textbook changes unacceptable
| by S Kalyanaraman | on 21 May 2016 |
The Instructional Quality Commission, California Board of Education (CBE), has permitted some opinionated scholars to make a series of errors and omissions, including seeking to change the name of ‘India’ to ‘South Asia’ in all school textbooks of California. The move has naturally triggered a raging debate.
The issues involved are simple. Some communist and leftist gangs headed by the Sanskrit scholar, Stephen Pollock, who hates India, want to erase the collective memory of ‘India’ from the tender minds of VIth and VIIth Grade schoolchildren.
This is thought-policing, which violates all principles of education, which these leftists masquerading as academics seek to achieve. This is Stalinist commissariat in action in the garbs of academics who enjoy ‘academic freedom’ and tenured faculty positions.
The tragic situation is compounded by some Indian corporates supporting persons like Pollock whose agenda is unambiguous, to destroy the notion of ‘India’ which is governed by the weltanschauung (world view) ofdharma-dhamma.
A group of academics brought up in the dharma-dhamma tradition have taken up cudgels against this academic cabal and its geographical myth of ‘South Asia’.
For generations, the word India and Hindu have evoked a world view of freedom of inquiry into phenomena. The framework which defines the objectives of life (purushartha) are abhyudayam (welfare) and nihs’reyas (bliss) at social and personal levels of inquiry and action.
The attempt of these hostile academics is to posit Christism and Islamism as the dominant cultural and religious phenomena which have defined the history and clashes of civilisations. By denying the world view of the Hindus, the cabal attempts to erase the viewpoints of over one billion people of the globe.
It is apposite to cite from the impassioned plea of the dharma-dhamma proponents in US academia.
Quotes from the letter of 10 May 2016 to CDE:
“We must therefore point out that some claims that might be presented by some university professors as “consensus” in their field, might well be only a form of dogma, and at the heart of several positions being fought for in the South Asia studies dogma today, is a reckless allegation about Hindus and Hinduism sharing common origins with Nazis and Nazism, and maybe even worse. Scholars like Wendy Doniger, for example, have written that the “Vedic drive toward wandering … had developed into what the Nazis called… Anschluss” [1]and have also made comparisons to the Native American genocide, and other scholars like Sheldon Pollock (credited as a consultant in the SAFG letters) have faced questions from over 150 traditional Indian scholars as well as thousands of readers for flaws in their scholarship as well as their attempts to somehow connect ancient Indian texts revered by millions of Hindus with the horrors of the Holocaust[2] (please see this report in Time magazine here http://time.com/4244326/india-harvard-sheldon-pollock-academics-petition-murty-library/ and this opinion from Professor Makarand Paranjape herehttp://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/the-problem-with-pollock/).
“Even if these allegations have not explicitly entered the California textbooks debate, the fact remains that the persistent and systematic denial of India and Hinduism (and Indian and Hindu-American ways of knowing both) by the South Asia Studies paradigm is deeply entwined with this academic fantasy about Hindus somehow being fascist conquerors of their own land! This sort of thinking comes from the 19th century Aryan Invasion Theory mumbo-jumbo, and if our colleagues in South Asia Studies Faculty Group really do reject the Aryan Invasion Theory as they profess to, they should be prepared to renounce it completely and help decolonize the curriculum, rather than merely prevaricate with excuses that we simply don’t know enough to reject the “migration” part.
“There are surely several creative ways in which the children of California can be taught that the origins of an ancient and diverse spiritual culture like Hinduism cannot be located in any simple fashion, while also steering us away from this lurking colonial-era “Hindus are Nazi” taint underlying the South Asia Studies dogma. What this dogma has done in higher education is problematic, and what it is poised to do in what ought to be the pristine and positive atmosphere of the K-12 classroom would be even worse. We are very disappointed that the SAFG suggestions in their present form amount to an erasure of the histories of not only Indians and Hindus, but also Hindu dalits and Hindu women, contrary to what they claim.”
The fraudulent political scientists led by Stephen Pollock deny the emphatic facts of ancient texts.
I wrote the following letter to the NY Times on the subject:
Re “Debate Erupts in California Over How Curriculum Should Portray India” (news article, May 6):
Dear Editor, NY Times
I agree with Vidhima that to call India as ‘South Asia’ is akin to asking her to change her name.
Hindu or India has been traditionally used to indicate the locus of a large population of the world which has the weltanschauung ‘world view’ of Dharma-Dhamma.
In Rigveda, one of the oldest human documents, there is a Sukta 10.125 where the divinity of learning calls herself, in a soliloquy, ‘I am Rashtrii’ which means, I am the Nation. This is the socio-political framework for a nation-state giving her
- a geographical boundary for governance
- people who were called Bharatam Janam
The Shukla Yajurveda (also called Vajasneyi Samhita 10.2) describes in detail the attributes of such a nation,rashtram.
History cannot be wiped out by the attempts at renaming using geographically bizarre notions such as South Asia without taking into account the works like the magnum opus of George Coedes, the French Epigraphist who titled his 1944 work Les états hindouisés d’Extrême-Orient (Trans. The Hinduised states of the Far Orient or Far East). If the political science scholars want to invent new names, they can as well choose HinduRashtrii which will be in conformity with the texts and political science literature.
The spread of this nation was described in literature as Asetu himachalam, that is, ‘From the Setu or Adam’s bridge to Himalayas’. As we all know, the Himalayas range from Hanoi in Vietnam to Teheran in Iran making the glacial ranges the Greatest Water Tower of the Globe still growing thanks to plate tectonics with Indian plate lifting up the Eurasian plate making the dynamic Himalayas grow 1 cm taller every year and yielding five of the greatest rivers of the globe, all of them perennial rivers.
I suggest that the effective rebuttal of the nonsense perpetrated by the commie academics is to constitute a Union of States along the Indian Ocean Rim, comprising Hindu mahasagar and Himalay parivaar, the 2.5 billion people who live by the tenets of dharma-dhamma. The Union is ready to take off with Trans-Asian Railway and Trans-Asian Highway Projects linking Bangkok to Vladivostok. This will be a civilisational state unparalleled in the history of civilisations and will restore the 49 nations of this parivaar to great socio-economic heights in a 10 trillion dollar GDP economy. India, Hindu Rashtrii should take the lead by setting up a National Water Grid assuring 24x7 water to every farm and every home in 6.2 lakh villages. This should become the model for the Union of Indian Ocean States.
https://www.pgurus.com/californias-indophobic-textbooks/
California’s Indophobic textbooks
Massive outrage by Indian-American community rolls back some of the proposed changes by Indophobic scholars
Meeting to decide the final stages of the History Social Science Framework on Thursday, 19 May, the Board of Education mainly reviewed and confirmed decisions made at the March 24 meeting, which was held in the wake of the Scholars for People petition against the erasure of India and Hinduism from school textbooks.
The Indophobic scholars, mainly from the South Asia Faculty Group (SAFG), had also recommended that “Hinduism be replaced with other terms” because “it is debatable whether Hinduism exists as an organized religion even today.” It goes without saying that they would not countenance giving a non-monotheistic tradition equal footing with Abrahamic creeds. However, the Board made a concession by not completely deleting “Hinduism” and opting for the March 24 ‘compromise’ of saying “ancient Indian religions including but not limited to Hinduism”.
More significantly, the CBE decided not to support the South Asia Faculty Group’s demand to delete the names of Vyasa and Valmiki, two of India’s greatest sages, from the curriculum. Scholars for People led by Professor Vamsee Juluri had raised a hue and cry over this proposal as these non-Brahmin sages were deeply respected by Dalit communities; they decried the move as “casteist”, which possibly had a deterrent effect. Thus, Valmiki, author of India’s primordial epic, Ramayana, and Vyasa, who composed the first version of the epic, Mahabharata, have been restored to the curriculum.
On the flip side, the Board deleted a reference to jatis having been self-governing in ancient India (which is how society governed itself in the absence of a unified polity). Instead, it retained language that stated that caste was tied to birth and religion (Hinduism). While this is largely true, historical instances of jatis moving up the caste hierarchy are probably too complicated to teach to middle school students. Hence, on this point, the Dalit activist groups and South Asia Faculty Group had their way.
The Instructional Quality Commission meeting was well attended, and nearly 200 people spoke on the occasion, including several pro-India children and several very nasty South Asia activists; some of them mocked and demeaned the children.
Interestingly, a Commission member reopened an accepted change on Islam and slavery and had it whitewashed. This change had been added after Uberoi Foundation scholars sent a letter saying they would accept critiques of caste if the textbooks would also include critiques of slavery in Islam. Ultimately, however, material deriding the caste system was retained and Islam sanitised.
Discussion on the course content is now officially over, and henceforth, discussions will be held with textbook publishers. The new books will come out in the next one or two years and will remain unchanged for the next decade.
Overall, the exercise upheld the British colonial dogma (John Strachey et al) that India is an agglomeration of mutually warring and tenuously linked ‘nationalities’ held together by force. This view maintains that Indian civilization is not a unified entity and Hinduism, the highest common denominator of Indian identity, came into existence only after ‘the British invented it in the 19th century’ (a version parroted by Romila Thapar et al). Paradoxically, the British are not blamed for Hinduism’s inherently oppressive and misogynist character! All other religions are upheld as egalitarian and gender-neutral – something difficult to substantiate on even a cursory reading of their scriptures.
The activism of Americans of Indian Origin could not overcome the general direction and tenor of the deliberations, which was to erase India and demean Hindus. Though over 280 million members of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes returned their religion as ‘Hindu’ in the Indian Census, the activist-scholars refused to accept them as Hindus, and wanted the textbooks to depict SC-ST ancestors as oppressed, lacking in agency or achievements. That is why they wanted to erase the names of Valmiki and Vyas, who infuse pride in Dalits of India and Pakistan.
The activist-scholars sought to demean the Sikhs by suggesting that ‘Sri Guru Granth Sahib should be replaced with Guru Granth’. They found Babar to be a ‘humanist’ though Guru Nanak had decried his violent invasions.
In the discussion on 9-11, it was asserted that Islam must not be singled out; instead there should be discussion on how Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism etc., too have led to religious violence. To uphold the discredited Aryan Invasion theory, they repeated the untruth that there was ‘no horse at Harappa’.
The activist scholars include Kamala Vishweshwaran, well-known as a political pamphleteer, viz. ‘No US Visa for Modi’, ‘Do not elect Modi as PM even though the NDA got a majority’, etc. Another eminence is Sheldon Pollock, who believes that Sanskrit literature spawned Nazism (in Europe, not India) and that the Ramayanawas meant to oppress the masses.
Another renowned academic is anthropologist Jonathan Kenoyer, who denied that Ghaggar Hakra was the Sarasvati River, which contradicts his own published works! This led some of the American Indian activists to wonder if the animosity of these US scholars towards India was due to the fact that the Indian archaeological establishment refuses to give them unchecked excavation rights in India, which they enjoy in Pakistan.
Be that as it may be, though American Indians managed a few victories, the 194-page long submission by Scholars for People could not ensure that India and Hinduism received the same standards of respect and fairness as all other civilizations, nations, and religions. The role of Islam and Christianity in slavery, colonialism, and genocide against the people of North and South America, Africa, and India and other parts of Asia was sanitised and Hinduism and India continued to be belittled.