Passport shame: What's really at the heart of the California textbook row on Hinduism

[rug]

It is a battle that will not die down, for it reveals a great split in the Indian American community.



Image credit: Hindu American Foundation via Facebook

12 hours ago
Updated 7 hours ago
Devdutt Pattanaik

Torn between those who feared the erasure of Dalits by Hindu radicals, and those who feared erasure of Hinduism and India by Hindu baiters, the final edit of the California textbooks was eventually a compromise.

It is a battle that will not die down, for it reveals a great split in the Indian American community of the United States of America. One side sees Hinduism and India as the oppressor. The other sees the religion and the state as the oppressed. Both seek justice, and demand respect. Both sides also have American passports.

At the heart of this debate lies a simple question: How does America explain Hinduism, and India, to American children? These American children include children of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan and Nepali origin, who are torn between their South Asian roots and their American homeland. How are they, and their friends, introduced to the land and culture of their ancestors, and to the customs and beliefs that are part of household lore?

On religion

When you have made yourself citizen of a land that addresses foreigners as aliens, the stakes are really high.

http://scroll.in/article/808906/at-the-heart-of-the-californian-textbook-row-are-hinduism-and-india-the-oppressor-or-the-oppressed

[Jim__]

1. I think another question lies at the heart of the debate.

Other than:

... How does America explain Hinduism, and India, to American children? ...

Is it possible to teach history from a neutral perspective? I have my doubts that it is. If it's not, the broader question is how should we teach history? If that question is answered satisfactorily, the question about how to explain Hinduism to American children will be covered.

[rug]

2. There is a parallel to the Cubans who left Cuba after Castro.

On the one side you have Cruz and Rubio, on the other you have those who stayed and supported Castro. Which has the truth about the Cuban revolution?

There will be no satisfactory teaching of the past until partisans stop trying to shape the past to form the future.

[Igel]

3. Who's judging "neutrality"?

You can come fairly close. You present what we natively think of as good and as bad and present the views of the time. You show how those views and actions changed over time. You can do that with respect for the people if you first admit that all people are flawed, ourselves included.

But I can't agree with the passage, "This becomes especially troublesome when other religions are presented as having none. Christianity is sanitised as the President of the United States takes his oath in office with a Bible in hand."

You can't get out of public school in any state without dealing with the Crusades, without looking at the Inquisition, Huguenots, persecution of Catholics or Puritans in Britain, witch-persecution by the Puritans, and issues of why the 1st amendment is there. Then there's Cotton Mather. And discussion of a connection between religion and justification for slavery, between religion and the KKK, persecution of Catholics and antipathy towards the Jews in the late 1930s.

The writer shifts in that paragraph using a passive: "other religions are presented as having none" in the textbook, then as being sanitised in the public media (but not sanitised in the topic of conversation, the textbook). As for Islam, even back in the 1970s when I was in school it was thoroughly sanitised: The Islamic conquest simply happened, Andalusia was great but ultimately rolled back with the Inquisition hard on its heels. Hinduism ... simply didn't exist in our textbook. You had to deal with Islam because in 400 AD there was a Roman Empire, and in 1200 AD there was an Islamic Empire, leading even the braindead to say, "WTF? Where did *that* come from?" And so it continued.

Even in college, my S. Asian history class sort of skimmed over the Islamic conquest there. The Moghuls had their problems, but the oppression of the locals by Muslims and the push to convert to Islam wasn't addressed. The Partition merely happened because Hindus were nasty to Muslims for no reason, it appeared.