A visitor takes a photo with figures of Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Indian independence icon Mahatma Gandhi (R) at the Pakistan Monument Museum in Islamabad.— AFP
While the government-sanctioned curriculums on both sides of the border appear largely ossified to their version of history, one Pakistan-based group has been using games and popular culture to challenge students to think critically about their past.
Qasim Aslam’s “History Project” runs sessions in schools in India and Pakistan, inviting students to compare how Partition accounts are presented in the two countries’ textbooks.
“By the time they are 20, it is solidified and stays with them all their lives,” Aslam said of the one-sided history lessons proffered in schools.
Mumbai-based student Mitra attended one of these sessions in April.
“It helped me to take a different viewpoint into account and to form a more balanced notion,” Mitra said.
“If I know only one part, then it’s not the complete truth.” Islamabad-based Pakistan Studies professor Tariq Rehman said that correcting bias in the official syllabi “would take a change in foreign policy” between the two countries.
“Authorities (in Pakistan) don’t seem to be interested in making changes and questioning the antagonism against India,” he added.
But there are small signs of progress. The latest revision of the state history textbook in India includes graphic first-hand accounts of atrocities committed by Hindus, and asks students if the violence could be considered a holocaust.
A book of testimonies titled “The Other Side of Silence” by Indian writer and Partition historian Urvashi Butalia is now also part of the high school syllabus in India.
Butalia said she is pleased that more people are trying to understand Partition beyond a nationalistic prism.
“It would have been impossible 20 years ago,” she said.
But outside the classroom, Butalia says there is little appetite for confronting hard truths about the past.
The author discovered a series of police reports of rapes and murders from 1947 that had been kept hidden because authorities feared “opening up a can of worms” if the horrifying accounts went public.
She also points to Humayan’s Tomb and Purana Qila -- two ancient monuments in New Delhi -- where thousands of Partition refugees sought sanctuary as the capital descended into chaos, noting there is no plaque at either site to remind the public of this troubled legacy.
“I do not say that silence is broken,” she added.
“We could learn so much, basically learn never to repeat that history, but we don’t memorialise it in any way,” she warned.
Published in Dawn, August 5th, 2017