Bulbuls entered a windowless prison cell and Veer Savarkar travelled on the wings of the bird, to pass through solid walls and take a tour of the motherland. That is what a Class VIII textbook in Karnataka told its students a few days ago.
Somewhere in the ethereal heavens, JRR Tolkien must be laughing as the incredulous incident is the replica of a scene from his fantasy masterpiece Lord of the Rings, wherein Gandalf climbs on the back of the bird Gwaihir to escape from his imprisonment. And Tolkien's Gwaihir was probably inspired by the Garuda.
Isn't history supposed to be facts, especially the one taught in schools to future generations? But history is written by the victors, goes the adage (No, Churchill did not say it -- and here is your first history lesson). History is rewritten by the ruling party should be the adage. Or as a prominent leader said, 'as we are now independent, we can write our own history', with no care in the world for facts.
This is nothing new. The Vajpayee-led NDA government was accused by historians of trying to 'saffronise education' while the Congress has been criticised for focusing too much on Mughal history in textbooks and marginalising information about Hindu rulers. In Rajasthan, textbooks are said to change every five years as the two national parties alternate in power. In 2017, the Battle of Haldighati got a makeover in the textbooks of the University of Rajasthan, as Maharana Pratap defeated Akbar in its pages. Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination and Jawaharlal Nehru find themselves missing from the texbooks of Class VIII in the state. It does not even mention India’s first prime minister and has a passing reference to the Mahatma. The new texbooks for Class X and XII resurrect Savarkar's 'bravery', much like the latest bulbul story.
Of course, Nehru continues to receive 'special' treatment as he found himself missing from the recently published full-page advertisment in newspapers, which celebrated India's freedom fighters. Of course Savarkar was featured, although he proclaimed himself to be 'the staunchest advocate of loyalty to the English government'.
Our history books teach us that Mughals are temple-ransackers and ones who replaced them with mosques, but does not mention the Hindu kings who destroyed Buddhist viharas and replaced them with Hindu temples. There's also no mention of the practice by victorious Hindu kings pillaging the temples of their rivals, looting their statues, even breaking some of them, and installing them as war trophies in their own temples. The Chandela king Yasovarman looted the solid gold Vishnu statue from the Pratihara rulers and placed it in the newly commissioned Lakshman temple at Khajuraho. That is a fact and it doesn't matter.
In the US, years after the Civil War, Southerners wrote and published their own history books for secondary schools. These 'mint julep textbooks', as the Southern all-white editions were called, either ignored the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by Wilkes Booth or distanced Southerners from Booth's actions. Which history is right? Or is there anything as correct history? After all events are always coloured by perspective. By this argument, the only history that can be considered authentic are the bare facts, but then again the recording and writing of the facts are always from the perspective of the historian.
History comprises facts, but facts do not define history. The bulbul deposited Savarkar back in his cell, did a Vulcan sign with his wing, said 'Beam me up, Scotty', and then teleported through the solid walls of the cellular prison. The rest, as they say, is history.
Anirban Bhattacharyya is an author, actor and standup comic. He can be reached at anirbanauthor@gmail.com.