It is difficult to understand why there is so much fear within a section of the academic community to the teaching of the entire history of Bharat, at least 6,000 years of it, rather than focusing on the past 300 years and in a much less comprehensive fashion, the previous 600 years.
As for the remaining five-sixth of the recorded history of Bharat, i.e. India, very little is said of this period. Indeed, from the Lord Macaulay period onwards, efforts have been incessant to convince young minds in particular that much of what happened during that period was myth, was just a necklace of stories. Macaulay’s purpose was to instil in young minds within the subcontinent that there was nothing noteworthy except during the period since the British and other European powers came to colonize the land that was termed India from the time of the heyday of the Greeks.
Once more than five millennia of the past was cast aside as myth, there would no longer be a civilisational pride among the colonised people in being part of Bharat, and consequently, far less likelihood of their attempting to cast off the British yoke. Being ruled by the British would seem to be the natural order of things, even while that rule was draining the land and its people of their wealth and capability. To this day, it is easier to find folk tales from faraway lands in bookstores in the cities than it is to locate a copy of the Hitopadesa or the Panchatantra. The fact is that reading either in classrooms would enthral every student, whatever be the religion he was born into, or the land he came from. Indeed, there is logic in beginning an enterprise that would translate such classics into languages spoken across the world, and make them available in bookstores in many countries.
Whether it be the poets of love, such as Vidyapati, or the architects of statecraft, such as Kautilya, their works are priceless and deserve to be part of the curricula of schools across the world, especially in the country where they were born. Whether Lord Rama or Lord Krishna are regarded as divinity or as heroes in the way Julius Caesar and Alexander were, to dismiss the accounts of their lives as mere stories without any foundation in fact is to fall into the trap that Macaulay set.
There are many who identify the ills caused by his Minute on Education as being the English language, and who oppose the teaching of English in government-run schools. It is not the banishing of a language that continues to be the international link language that is needed, but the banishing of ignorance of the entirety of the history of Bharat. The ancients had immense wisdom, including in their dictum that caste did not flow from the accident of birth, but through the occupation chosen by the householder. Teaching the Panchatantra or the Hitopadesa would not just enthral but educate minds through the fables they retailed.
Teaching the Ramayana or the Mahabharata would serve as a guide to conduct that would ensure a better life. If the life of Alexander or Julius Caesar is known all over the world, why not the lives of Lord Ram and Lord Krishna? If the Southeast Asian conquests of the British or the Spanish are known, why not the spread of the Chola Empire in the same locations? Such knowledge would give confidence to young minds, for the lessons they contain are not bound by timelines. It was an Australian historian, A.L. Basham, who wrote a book everyone interested in our history must read, “The Wonder that was India”.
Each of the works mentioned in his carefully chosen compilation of gems from the past needs to be a part of school curricula, rather than remain consigned to the lists of the forgotten.