The serial jousts between coastal Andhra and Telangana have always been presented by the media as being akin to the Partition of India and Pakistan, bringing to mind images of visceral massacres and long lines of migrants across borders. Inappropriate metaphors are easy to reach for.
So it wasn't surprising that when a leak earlier this week suggested that the government of the truncated state of Andhra Pradesh was poised to revise its school textbooks to make no mention of the so-called enemy state of Telangana, the hasty-pudding media declared that this was a "war of textbooks".
The hostilities, apparently, had been declared when the Telangana government, shortly after the creation of the new state in June 2014, announced that its entire school curriculum would be revised to reflect the history, culture, festivals and society of its people.
Officials in the textbook revision committees on either side indicate that war correspondents to this skirmish are likely to be disappointed.
Revise what?
For starters, there is little that coastal Andhra Pradesh would need to revise. The textbooks of the unified state were always written to reflect the cultural and linguistic nuances of the people of coastal Andhra and proffered as applicable to all Telugu-speaking people. All that remains to be done is to update the facts: such as the number of districts (23 then, 13 now), population, literacy and the like.
Apart from simple editing, the textbooks are likely to avoid mentioning the spasmodic struggle for Telangana that dogged the old state of Andhra Pradesh for its 58 years. That too will be no exertion because textbooks, both of the Central Board of Secondary Education and state boards, have long gone from being episodic in their content, featuring lists of kings and their deeds, to being thematic, dealing with ideas rather than events.
The old textbook for Class X, which is still in use, gives all of two paragraphs to the agitation that brought about the creation of a unified state of Andhra Pradesh on the basis of linguistic identity in 1956. On the subsequent disaffection of the people of Telangana right until the divorce last year, it was silent anyway.
Culture of Telangana
However, on the Telangana side, the exercise is likely to be comprehensive. The mandate to the two committees (social studies and Telugu literature) drafting the new curriculum is two-fold: steer clear of the temptation to expend vitriol on the neighbour, and make the narrative true to the culture of Telangana.
Some of the changes are obvious: festivals like Batukamma (a fertility ritual during the Dasara festivities), eulogies of young men and women who immolated themselves during the struggle for a separate state, Telangana personalities who fought against the British, more Telangana writers, etc.
Members of the Telangana drafting committee say the new textbooks will continue to draw from the historic figures who contributed to the common Telugu heritage even if their provenance is in coastal Andhra. Such writers range from the 11th century poet Nannaya Bhattaraka who composed the first Telugu telling of the Mahabharata to more recent writers like Gurajada Apparao, Devulapalli Krishna Sastry, Sri Sri and Vishwanatha Satyanarayana.
However, there will be greater representation of Telangana writers such as Suravaram Pratap Reddy, Cherabanda Raju and Kaloji Narayana Rao who were given less than their due in the old dispensation. Further, the net has been cast wide to include new Telangana writers who write in the local dialect and idiom.
The textbook committees on either side are influenced by the Madhya Pradesh-based NGO Ekalavya, which pioneered teaching to non-Anglicised pupils in their native dialects. Thus we should see in the Telangana textbooks a departure from language patterns native to the Krishna-Godavari delta that have held sway over Andhra Pradesh textbooks, and therefore Telugu literature, cinema, media for decades.
The Telangana textbooks are sure to be rid of excessively Sanskritised Telugu and expunging some words and phrases that are native to the Krishna delta and foreign to Telangana. One committee member said in sum, “So we’ll soon call the bottle gourd anapakaya rather than sorakaya. And buffaloes will be called barrel u rather than gedelu.”
It might sound trivial to bicker over bottle gourds but differences in dialect were a major point of contention between the two regions when they cohabited in the old state.
Correcting distortions
The textbook revision is also being planned as an exercise to correct some distortions in history. For one thing, the contribution of the Vijayanagara kings to Telugu culture, while significant, is likely to dim a bit in the new textbooks, mainly because they never held sway over the land to the north of the Krishna, which is Telangana. Similarly, the contribution of the Satavahanas, Kakatiyas and Qutb Shahis, three empires which ruled the whole of the Telugu land from Telangana, is likely to be amplified.
None of these issues is likely to be contested when the textbooks emerge from the press. The one challenge for the curriculum committee is sure to come from that age-old source: the role of the Muslim rulers of the Asaf Jahi dynasty and their repression of nationalist and peasant movements in the princely state of Hyderabad.
Indications are that the government of K Chandrasekhar Rao would like to draft the 14% Muslim population into the coalition that is building the new state. So how would the textbooks portray the last Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan, dear to the Muslims who constitute 33% of today’s Hyderabad?
People close to the committee say the brief is to look at the nice things, such as the splendid buildings he built in the capital with the taxes extracted from the peasantry by him and his allies, the dominant castes of Telangana. And the not-so-nice things?
In the perpetration of these, the Nizams were aided by the doras, the zamindar class, which today purports to be a participant in the new coalition, but what when the tale has to be told?
Will the war then be fought within?
No comments:
Post a Comment