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Educators in California have unleashed debate by revising textbooks.

By Scott Baldauf

NEW DELHI In the halls of Sacramento, a special commission is rewriting Indian history: debating whether Aryan invaders conquered the subcontinent, whether Brahman priests had more rights than untouchables, and even whether ancient Indians ate beef.

That this seemingly arcane Indian debate has spilled over into California's board of education is a sign of the growing political muscle of Indian immigrants and the rising American interest in Asia.

The foes - who include established historians and Hindu nationalist revisionists - are familiar to each other in India. But America may increasingly become their new battlefield as other US states follow California in rewriting their own textbooks to bone up on Asian history.

At stake, say scholars who include some of the most elite historians on India, may be a truthful picture of one of the world's emerging powers - one arrived at by academic standards of proof rather than assertions of national or religious pride.

"Some of the groups involved here are not qualified to write textbooks, they do not draw lines between myth and history," says Anu Mandavilli, an Indian doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California, and activist against the Hindu right. Speaking of one of the groups, the Vedic Foundation in Austin, Texas, she adds, "On their website, they claim that Hindu civilization started 111.5 trillion years ago. That makes Hinduism billions of years older than the Big Bang." (The assertion has since been pulled from the site.)

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In the wonderful book, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", Richard Feynman describes his experience in helping choose California textbooks.

He received one book which had covers, but the pages were empty. He called the person who was in charge and asked them what was up.

He was told the publisher didn't have time to get the book ready for the evaluation, so they just sent it out without content.

He was told not to worry about it, just give it a medium evaluation mark and everyone would be happy.

[/slight thread drift]

I don't know if it's possible to write a history text that is acceptable to everyone, unless it's about a history that has nothing to do with those who read it.

History is one of those things everyone has a stake in...

edited for the sake of editing

[ 25 January 2006: Message edited by: maestro ]