ABSTRACT
The discussion in this chapter takes as its point of departure the many controversies following NCERT’s decision to publish new history textbooks. The most comprehensive critique of the new history textbooks can be found in the report History in the New NCERT Textbooks – A Report and an Index of Errors , written on behalf of the Indian History Congress by Irfan Habib, Suvira Jaiswal and Aditya Mukherjee. 1 This volume contains a systematic and detailed discussion of all the alleged errors in the textbooks published by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). However, it is not the content of this report which I examine. Of greater importance to this discussion is the response it generated from the textbook authors Makkhan Lal, Meenakshi Jain and Hari Om, which has the title History in the New NCERT Textbooks: Fallacies in the IHC Report. 2 This response, hereafter referred to as Fallacies in the IHC Report , was published and distributed by the NCERT, indicating that the views presented by the three textbook authors had official approval. Fallacies in the IHC Report does not address schoolchildren, but the public in general and the community of historians in particular. Since my study aims to uncover the existence of a narrative pattern, I will limit the discussion in this chapter to identifying the most contentious issues raised in this report.
