‘The People of India’: History that engages kids

How should history be written for children that is both interesting and relevant? ‘The People of India’ has taken up this challenge by focusing on themes that should be of interest to all of us.

One such theme is the Partition of India that killed lakhs of people and forced millions to migrate. The story of Partition is not just that of the creation of new nation-states, but also of violence, trauma, displacement and other catastrophies. The book then takes up India’s great cultural and linguistic diversity and the importance of nurturing it. Yet another theme is that of rivers and wars that constitute each other’s anti-thesis. Rivers have been nourishing human life for centuries, just as wars have been destroying it for centuries. We need to control wars and let rivers follow their own course without interfering. Instead, we have let wars go on unchecked and created dams on rivers to alter their natural flow. The results have been disastrous.

There are delightful sections on our eating habits, clothing patterns and stories of games such as hockey, cricket and football. One chapter has gone into the history of tea, and how it has become such an important aspect of our cultural life. These are all important slices of human life and the book has brought them all together in a single volume in an extremely lucid and readable way.

Some common threads bind these different stories together. The primary focus is not on mega structures, nation-states or economy, but rather on people, their lives and experiences. The basic approach is social rather than political or economic.

The book offers a view of everyday lives of ordinary people. It does not simply highlight India’s great diversity but also celebrates it. Our diversity — cultural, linguistic, religious — is a great asset and, unless nurtured consciously, might disappear under the flattening bulldozer of modernity.

The book rightly emphasises India’s long history marked by multiple encounters — both political and cultural — with outsiders. The cultural encounters brought new dynamism to India, just as Indians contributed to the lives of outsiders.

One important feature of this book is its contemporaneity. It highlights those aspects of the past that have a connectivity with the present. To take an example, the partition of India into two (and later three) nation-states created a problem of citizenship. A simple drawing of a national boundary converted a citizen into an alien and an outsider. A large number of Bengalis and Punjabis became outsiders almost overnight. In order to identify their own citizens, the new nation-states had to create new laws of citizenship. These laws, in time, created new identity markers such as citizen, emigrant, refugee and even infiltrator.

These markers were obviously accompanied by social attitudes of prejudice and suspicion. A change of law on paper could so easily convert a citizen into a refugee, or worse, an infiltrator. This arbitrariness of rules has played havoc with the lives of many people, and continues to do so.

This book for children does not offer a neutral account of the past. It evokes compassion for the poor and the marginalised without being condescending towards them. It underscores the transformative capacity of modernity, but also that this transformation has affected people most unevenly.

Any history story that celebrates the achievements of modernity must also spare a thought for its victims. The book highlights the destructive dimension of modern life most comprehensively and admirably.

— The reviewer is Visiting Faculty at the BML Munjal University, Manesar