I attended the History for Peace regional conference that took place at Vidyashilp Academy in Bengaluru on 26th and 27th of June. The topic of this conference was Re-thinking ‘Never Again’ and various scholars spoke about the challenges faced by history as a discipline, how hate and memories are selectively marshalled to create distorted perceptions and how we, as part of the larger diaspora of history-teachers and history-enthusiasts, could respond to these changes. The speakers expressed with urgency how history-teaching in schools must show students how to critically approach false narratives they see on social media. There were various discussions about whether technology––the outreach of social media and the use of AI––must be completely shunned or if it could be used to counter these false narratives and create a richer historical consciousness among the students. 

Professor Tanika Sarkar delivered the keynote address. She spoke about the dangerously increasing ‘demolition drives of syllabus’ in central universities like JNU. Not limiting herself to just central universities, she went on to talk about how teachers at Ashoka University (a private university) were also being censored. Lessons about the Mughals, caste and untouchability were being removed from school syllabi. This reflects the growing trend of a state-backed effort to distort history and present another version, modified to the state’s political needs. 

Tanika Sarkar | Keynote Address

She also spoke about a paradox appearing in the study of history––History is seen as a drab and boring subject but is still at the center stage of every person’s interest (ironically people who lack training in the discipline). This version of history in the ‘post-truth past’ gave the same legitimacy to fictionalized history as it did to any historian’s study. While she accepts that history is an open-ended subject i.e. open to debates, she also notes that arguments have to always be based on solid evidence. 

Sarkar pointed out a few ways in which these false narratives could be countered. She drew attention to how trained historians had begun writing for younger audiences to interest them in the evidence based practice of history.  She also noted that the way history is taught should be more activity-based, including history labs, enacting plays and skits in the classroom. In addition to this, there is also the very important work of countering the distortion of history in school textbooks. 

This address raised some very important questions and ideas, ones which remained relevant to the later talks in the conference. It demonstrated the immediate problems history faced as a discipline in contemporary Indian and put forth ways in which we could work to solve these problems. 

Dr. Naina Dayal in her address, India before Islam: Notes from Teaching the History of Religion in Early India, explored the idea of foreigners and what made them foreign to us. Her lecture began with migrations before we had evolved into Homo sapiens sapiens. She briefly spoke about the Aryans, a linguistic group who reinforced the idea that using Sanskrit gave a person a superior status. The majority of her talk focused on the period between empires i.e. between the Maurya and Gupta empires. During this time, the Indo-Greeks, who were called yavanas by the locals, minted coins in their rulers’ names. In fact, we know a lot about the yavanas through their extensive coinage. The ruler’s name was printed in both Greek and Prakrit. Some silver coins also contained images of Krishna and Balaram.

Naina Dayal | India before Islam: Notes from Teaching the History of Religion in Early India

Through these examples, Dayal highlighted that outreach was seen as an important tool for ruling the locals. Since the yavanas were not ‘indigenous’ to India, at least during the first two generations, they felt a need to connect with the local people, perhaps in an effort to remove the ‘outsider’ tag (since to the others they were mleccha). This was clearly shown in the way the Indo-Greeks tried to incorporate the language of the locals, even their gods.

The Indo-Scythians or Shakas were a group who were displaced by other tribes from Central Asia, forcing them to cross the Hindukush and enter the subcontinent. They in turn displaced the Greeks in Gandhara, making it their stronghold. They also took the city of Takshila. Similar to the yavanas, the Shakas also continued the practice of minting bilingual coins. Some of their coins included depictions of Gajalakshmi. 

I felt that Dr. Dayal was trying to convey that there had always been an ‘other’ in the subcontinent but the foreign-ness of the ‘invaders’ under scrutiny in the present day somehow only applies to medieval India. The term mleccha or outsider, is a concept that still persists today. Dayal drew attention to examples from the Vyasa’s Mahabharata which vividly depict empire-building as an inherently violent process. She also mined various examples from the Jatakas to show how the figure of Vyasa had been used by the Buddhist texts. She demonstrated how early India was perhaps far from the idyll we think it to be and was marked by great violence of empire building and fake ascetics. 

In the plenary session, we had some time to dwell on the lectures of the day. Teachers spoke about the ways in which they could make classes more interesting and engaging for the students. As a student, I thought of how my classes in school could have been different. I thought about a concept named IWC (Images without context), where a series of images from a particular historical event would be shown to the student with no context given and the students would have to observe the image carefully and come up with the context behind it. Therefore instead of passive interpretation this would enable students to notice a lot of details which cannot be simply read out of a textbook. While discussing this idea, we also reflected on the practicality of doing this in a classroom where teachers are bound by pressure to complete the syllabus. While the teachers were enthusiastic about implementing these alternative ways of teaching in their classrooms, a lot of them whom I spoke to pointed out that the reason they were not able to implement them were the strict regulations imposed by the school to teach in a very exam-oriented fashion. 

Participants interacting with each other in the plenary

The last session of the day was a workshop conducted on the topic ‘History’s Shadows’. We were first asked to walk around the room and think about the topic of the workshop, and about the concept of discrimination and injustice. After that, we sat down in groups, and were given a set of questions to think about and share within our groups. The main theme of the questions was to make us think about the moments in our life where we felt discriminated against or felt injustice.

Participant in 'History's Shadows'

My example was connected to the Kaveri issue between Tamizh Nadu and Karnataka and the larger issue of language intolerance. I had some very interesting observations during this part of the workshop. Two other members of my group had similar stories to mine. Not only did that give me a sense that I was not the only person facing these issues but also broadened the issue in my mind when I realized that this was less of a personal problem I faced and that it was a simple needle in a haystack of issues. Another member of my group shared a heartbreaking story about how her husband’s family was caught in the carnage of the Gujarat communal riots and how that had completely traumatized and changed her perception of safety as a religious minority in India. This is when I realized that however privileged one was, there would always be one or the other identity which would be exploited and looked down upon by a section of society.

This led me to think about how privileged I was as a savarna, upper-middle-class male but still had that one identity as a Tamizhan which was looked down upon in a different society. It brought me to the conclusion that discrimination and injustice reign supreme everywhere, purely due to the fact that people who themselves are exploited are on a continuous search for others whom they can exploit to get back whatever they think they have lost. This is a vicious cycle. 

Angana P. Chatterji’s lecture Erasure/Counter-Memory: De-racializing Kashmir in India’s Historical Present focussed on the contemporary history of Kashmir and the effects of violence in popular memory, that the state strives so hard to erase. Although everyone knows that Kashmir is a conflict-ridden place, I found, through my conversations with many teachers, that they did not quite realize the extent of the violence. Angana Chatterji shared testimonies of Kashmiris who had experienced such violence, who still struggled with the trauma. These Kashmiris were repeatedly presumed terrorists or persecuted on the charge that they posessed knowledge about terrorists or sheltered them. She described how the situation in Kashmir has amplified due to the fear each section of the community harbours towards each other. Chatterji carefully interrogates the ascription of this terrorist tag, the role of the state and its psychological impact on both parties––state and citizens. Importantly, she flags how this politics of hatred has prevented possibilities of communication, erased identities and transformed violence into an everyday reality Kashmiris struggle with.  

Angana P. Chatterji | Erasure/Counter-Memory: De-racializing Kashmir in India’s Historical Present

Chatterji co-founded the ‘International People's Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir’ and co-wrote a report on around 2,700 unmarked graves in Kashmir. It was heartbreaking to hear that out of all those graves––wherein among the buried people (killed because they were presumed terrorists) only one person could be branded a terrorist. The impact of this speech on me was tremendous. I was aware of atrocities being committed in Kashmir, but when Prof Chatterji shared the testimonies she had collected, it gave a visceral sense of reality that I didn’t have before. It made a lot of the participants wonder why there was this surge of pride about Kashmir and attempts to make it 'truly' Indian when little was being done to actually remedy the violence, address the people who have been hurt. I found this speech very relevant to the topic of the conference, “Revisiting ‘Never Again’”, since we are seeing nothing short of a genocide, or genocides in the plural, in other parts of the world. A majority of us still keep quiet about it, many are not even aware and many support it citing our nationalism and our patriotism.

Professor Janaki Nair delivered the last lecture, Should Indian children develop ‘National Pride’ or ‘Historical Understanding’?, a discussion on NCERT textbooks and how the NEP 2020 (National Education Policy) was changing them. She began her lecture with a discussion on the phrase 'Never Again' coined by Theodor Adorno as note of caution––that education's purpose had to ensure that an atrocity like the Holocaust could not occur again. However, the selective mobilization of memory had made it such that victims of violence had not become more empathetic, instead their trauma had taken violent shape. Victims had become perpetrators, doing unto a vilified 'other' what was done unto them. Professor Nair drew on the role of pedagogy in influencing the affect, in instrumentalizing memory with the example of changes to the NCERT textbooks.

Professor Nair was one of the people who helped write the old NCERT textbooks which are now being replaced. She first spoke about the features the old books had which tried to make history interesting for students. One example she gave were the small boxes of primary sources. Another example were the small activities suggested for the teachers to do in their classes. Since I have been a student of these specific textbooks, I immediately had some questions regarding these statements. I had seen teachers ignore these boxes completely. Students would rejoice if one of these boxes was big enough to cover a whole page, since it would be one less page for them to study for the exams. When I spoke about it with many of the teachers there, they agreed that they did ignore those boxes, but argued that it was not practical for them to discuss primary sources when they had a syllabus to complete. Moreover, they also asked what the point of discussing primary sources with children who have not made the choice of taking humanities yet would be. 

Janaki Nair | Should Indian children develop ‘National Pride’ or ‘Historical Understanding’?

Professor Nair also discussed how the older books did not shy away from controversial topics such as temple destruction. Meanwhile, the newer books aimed at censoring and removing certain topics from the book. They also added new chapters such as one named ‘When the Land became Sacred’. She discussed the fact that while such chapters aren’t inherently controversial or wrong, the activities described in them make dangerous assumptions in the field history. She completed the lecture by talking about how the newer books focused on ‘Historical Wounds’ rather than ‘Historical truths’, and how that could have dangerous consequences. 

The other workshop at the conference was named, The AI We Need. This session aimed to explore the increasing role of AI in classrooms, to make teachers understand how it could be very dangerous and how such dangers could be countered. We were taught to notice the tone that AI spoke in. We were divided into groups and each group had to ask the AI a simple question to which we already knew the answer. My group asked the question ‘What is photosynthesis?’. The AI answered correctly and we asked it what its sources were. The way the AI answered this was very interesting. It said that it was ‘common knowledge’ and that it didn’t use any specific sources to answer the questions but still provided a few sources ‘in case we needed them’. Many of the teachers in my group were taken aback by the tone of the AI and they said that it felt like it was talking like a human. Shahnaaz Khan also showed us a conversation she had had with the AI, where she asked what the negative consequences of an AI can be. While the AI did give a detailed explanation of them, it was very noticeable that it continuously had a defensive tone. 

Participants at the workshop, 'The AI We Need'

The main reaction of the teachers to this workshop was pure shock at the advancements AI has made. Although I am comparatively more accustomed to AI than the teachers, this was a sort of revelation for me as well. The fact that AI has developed to the point that it does not specify sources to explain something, points to how much information has been entered in its database. This information has entered due to the large-scale use of AI by humans. Therefore, it was a reflection on the scale of dependence humans are falling into when it comes to these AIs. 

In conclusion, this workshop was really informative for me. More importantly, it achieved its purpose of educating the teachers about how their classrooms could be updated and upgraded. It made them think about how they could make a difference in how history was seen as a subject. Most importantly, it made them open up to new innovative ideas they could implement in their classes. I thought the way the lectures were structured was really interesting. I noticed that on each day, one lecture was about the classroom and how history is changing, and another lecture was about historical events and evidence. I thought this gave a really nice balance, since one part of the day taught the participants how to teach history and the other taught them what to teach. The plenary workshops were also extremely helpful, since it gave the participants a space to recollect and write down what they learnt from that day. While seeing what others learnt as well, it only adds to the productivity of those sessions overall. The workshop on ‘History’s Shadows’ taught the participants how to approach sensitive events in history, which still are fresh in everyone’s minds. This is some of the feedback I got from the participants. The only ‘problem’ they cited was the practicality of implementing these ideas in an actual classroom. It is imperative to understand that the education system must be modified to focus on learning rather than an unhealthy obsession with examinations. 

Speakers, Facilitators and Participants at 'Rethinking Never Again', Vidyashilp Academy

The author is an undergraduate student at the Azim Premji University.