Itihasa made itihasya...

Schools, learning, teaching, universal access, textbooks and more ...Matters educational are tenuously holding centre stage in contemporary India where otherwise facetious debates on corruption, gender violence, caste and communal fracases, economic stimulus and likes, form the cynosure of public attention,   determined and defined mostly by hyperventilating TV news anchors and some by scholars and experts  in ed and op ed pages of leading dailies. But in their discourses, issues connected to education emerge often in terms of numbers: poor enrollment, high drop out rates or when lamenting the qualitative aspects; poor infrastructure, pitiable computing, reading and writing abilities, ( resulting mostly from) woeful teaching standards. However such concerns appear very normalizing wherein other knowledge paradigms and possibilities of learning and teaching is barely taken cognizance of. So even when the tardy enforcement of RTE, viewed to be a progressive legislation to universaliz

Introduction - This relates to the chapters on tribes in the NCERT history textbooks. Often for young and old the word tribe has strong symbolic associations and much of it is as adjectives like ‘uncivilized’, 'uncultured', ‘primitive’ and more severely ‘barbaric’, ‘savage’.   Though many of these attributes do have a historical significance, in the discourse of commonsense these features carry strong negative connotations. These chapters in NCERT books - 'What books and burials tell us' ( Class VI TB), 'Tribes, Nomads and Settled Communities' (Class VII TB) and Tribals, Dikus and the Vision of Golden Age (Class VIII TB) seek to present a much needed corrective. But rather than dealing with these chapters separately in classes VI, VII and VIII,  it can be done as one long unit for a more comprehensive and contemporary understanding of tribal issues. The word tribe is a very loaded term and therefore I have tried to qualify the word often, though no

The class VII NCERT history textbook Our Pasts has a very interesting conceptualization of chapters. While the first few chapters i.e. 2,3 and 4 deal with the political history of medieval India in a more conventional fashion the remainder of the chapters dwell on the social, economic, religious and cultural changes that unfolded in the same period of time. The latter chapters are in effect further elaborations of the first few where it seeks to unravel the processes that shaped medieval India. In that sense the chapters dovetails rather seamlessly into one another. But at another level,  not just the continuities in the chapters but such an arrangement of chapters in a textbook, which is largely thematic, in itself may be puzzling. I have tried to look at chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9 i.e. Towns, Traders and Craftspersons; Tribes, Nomads and Settled Communities; Devotional Paths to the Divine and The making of Regional Cultures as one unit. A synopsis of these chapters - To summarize