#gn devy

The protests against the revisions in textbooks are not futile. The Kannada writers objecting to the new texts on the block are raising pertinent questions: What, after all, is the narrative of Karnataka? What should textbooks be composed of to weave the spirit and being of Karnataka into the minds of young learners? What kind of texts will socialise them as citizens of the world who live in India, who belong to the state of Karnataka— a country that the Constitution defines as a ‘Union of States’? If K V Puttappa gets truncated in a text, will the mind of readers have a place for vishwamanavata or universal humanism and develop a sacred affinity with their native Kannada Nadu? That love for Karnataka cannot come by merely using bombastic Sanskritised words or absurd English abbreviations — a tendency rife in the present regime. If Devanur Mahadeva, a champion of freedom of expression and an outstanding writer, withdrew permission to use his Edege Bidda Akshara in textbooks, this should serve as enough of a reason for the government to halt its ideological cleansing and revisionist programme.

For almost a thousand years since Basavanna, Karnataka formed its identity through a lively dialectic between the ‘living presence of a teacher’s mind’ and the ‘dominant national narrative’. What defines Karnataka is the rich history of the tension between the two. The best of Karnataka’s medieval scholarship was devoted to subversive and creative re-interpretations of older texts, not a mechanical adoption and extension. The Rohit Chakrathirtha Committee appears to have set aside the historical reality of the very spirit of learning in Karnataka as well as the principle of inclusion that Dr Ambedkar embedded in the Constitution.

Text, a term drawn upon the Latin ‘textile’ and ‘texture’, was used to indicate the state of ‘being woven together.’ Texts, be it the ‘sutra-path’ of Panini or the ancient Roman ‘textum’ or the early American text ‘The New England Primer’ or the colonial textbooks discussed by Dharampal in his work on pre-colonial education, all had a common purpose. It was to weave the minds of children together into a dominant national or cultural narrative. All textbooks are based on this principle, in both good and bad times. Mahatma Gandhi had, therefore, written in 1937 that “if textbooks alone are to be used as vehicle of knowledge, the living presence of a teacher’s mind will have no space in education.”