Thread by @AbhishBanerj

I went to Angrezi medium school as a child, run by missionaries. I was a victim of ICSE syllabus.

In ICSE, we would learn in detail about the beauty of Scottish landscape captured in Wordsworth's poetry. But nothing about India. (1/n)

In Classes 9 and 10, we had to study in detail Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, written in ancient, unintelligible English. But the worst part was that racist, anti-Semitic views in the play were fed to us without giving any context. (2/n)

Imagine a room full of kids, uncritically listening & repeating after the teacher that Jews are dogs & snakes. No attempt made to put the racist crap in historical context of Shakespeare's time

I guess hating Jews is one thing leftists & Xtian missionaries could agree on.

(3/3)

The history syllabus treated our South as stepkids of India and North East was not even acknowledged.

Only thing we learned about Vijaynagara, for instance, is that they lost the battle of Talikota in 1565.

(4/n)

Not only the South was treated as unimportant, but Hindu kings were also discriminated against.

After the Gupta empire ending around 600 CE, syllabus skipped almost right away Delhi Sultanate.

Palas, Rashtrakutas who ruled over massive empires were mostly footnotes/missed.

Same way, the Sikh and Maratha empires which came after Mughal rule were mostly forgotten as syllabus moved on to the British Empire.

The motive was clear : to give us Hindus the impression that being ruled by others is our natural state of being.

The only loophole in ICSE syllabus was Hindi & possibly other Indian languages. Guess St Stephens alumni were too proud to look into that.

So we ended up learning in Hindi book passages about kings like Ranjit Singh. Or even how Patel united the princely states.