Periodic revisions of textbooks are essential.
There is a Robert Frost poem that students of a particular vintage would be familiar with: “I shall be telling this with a sigh/ Somewhere ages and ages hence:/ Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — / I took the one less travelled by,/ And that has made all the difference.” One of the joys of literature is to lead the reader to the unexpected thrills of this unfamiliar road: A writer one has never heard of; a world view that shocks; a piece of writing so achingly beautiful that one does not want it to end. It leads one to a world beyond the familiar and the comfortable, turning readers into seekers. In its newly revamped English textbook for Class VI, Poorvi, developed in line with the New Education Policy 2020’s call for a curriculum “rooted in the Indian and local context and ethos”, the NCERT has sought to locate this universe in India’s diversity. The poems, essays and stories it now features are by some of India’s best-known writers, including S I Farooqi, Sudha Murty and others. It offers students a glimpse of the heterogeneity that exists in the country. But in leaving out international writers largely, it does young people a disservice — it robs them of a window to a wider world.
Periodic revisions of textbooks are essential. There is pragmatism in introducing children to the multitudes contained in India, cutting across boundaries of region and language, custom and religion. There is heft, too, in the idea of decolonisation that can serve as an introduction to the wide arc of literature that exists outside of the traditional canon. The study of any discipline requires context and a colonial trajectory is anything but representative. But such revisions must not lose sight of the goal: To expose students to a vibrant curriculum that encourages curiosity, enhances critical thinking and acts as a springboard to the lives and experiences of those both culturally and geographically like and unlike themselves. For that, merely “made in India” literature is not enough.
One of the comforts of literature — unlike social science, for instance — is that it deals not merely with the specificities of events but with the universality of emotions. The world can be a strange unfamiliar place but human nature is the same everywhere, governed by love and hate, greed and goodness, hope and despair. It is this delicate balance between home and the world, between what lies within and what meets the eye that should determine what goes into the curriculum and in what proportion. The NCERT would do well to keep that in mind for future revisions.
