NCERT Introduces More ‘Upanishad’ Stories In Class 6 Textbook
The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has released its new Social Science textbooks with multiple debatable additions and deletions. The new Class 6 social science textbook Exploring Society: India and Beyond replaced three separate textbooks of introductory history, political science, and geography.
The entire textbook is structured around five themes. The first two chapters come under one theme, dedicated to Geography. The second and third themes are ‘Tapestry of the Past’ and ‘Our Cultural Heritage and Knowledge Traditions’.
The seventh chapter of the textbook, titled ‘India’s cultural roots’ gives an extended commentary on Vedas and Upanishads. The older textbook had featured only one story from the Upanishads- ‘Chhandogya Upanishad’, while the new textbook has two more additional stories from the ‘Katha Upanishad’ and the ‘Brihadaranyaka Upanishad’.
Besides, an 18th-century painting depicting a scene from the Ramayana has also been included.
The Upanishads are the philosophical-religious texts of Hinduism that develop and explain the fundamental tenets of the religion.
The textbook has referred to the Indus Valley Civilization or the Harappan Civilization as the “Indus-Sarasvati” civilization and “Sindhu-Sarasvati civilization, foregrounding the Hindu Right’s contention that the desiccation of the mythical Sarasvati river led to the decline of the Harappan civilization.
The Hindu Right had used the Sarasvati river’s reference in the Rig Veda as proof to establish its larger hypothesis that Aryans did not migrate to India but were indigenous inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent.
However, this argument was ruled out by historians with the claim that even in the late Harappan phase, when the civilization was in a state of decline, it was 200-500 years before the Rig Veda was written.
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The Sarasvati river mentioned in Rig Veda was used as an important tool in the Hindu Right’s hands to lay claim to its political thesis that the Hindu civilization is the “original” culture of the subcontinent.
With the introduction of the new NCERT textbook, it seems to politicize the students by serving them with unproven facts.
