By Deepa S. Reddy
Every six years, the California State Board of Education (SBE) and the California Department of Education (CDE) review public school textbooks for core subjects (History–Social Science, Mathematics, Reading/Language Arts, Science). The Curriculum Development and Supplemental Materials Commission, an advisory body to the SBE, makes recommendations to SBE for specific revisions to the textbooks. This process is open to public comment from interested parties, including religious groups. In 2005–06, a controversy began to unfold over the references to Hinduism and Indian history in the public review process for History–Social Sciences textbooks commissioned by the CDE. Below is a timeline of key events, followed by a brief analysis of the debate.
September 2005: Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu groups each independently submitted their edits to the proposed textbooks. Representing Hindus were the Hindu Education Foundation (HEF; affiliated to the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, the American counterpart to the RSS) and the Vedic Foundation (VF; an arm the Barsana Dham temple in Austin, Texas). Their concerns were largely with stereotypical, demeaning and inaccurate representations of Hindu history, theology and practice: poorly and patronisingly written explanations, tacit validation of the Aryan Invasion theory of Hindu origins and migration, assumptions about the treatment of women and about the institution of caste. The CDE then established an ad hoc committee to review the edits and corrections proposed by the various groups, including Hindus. It retained Dr Shiva Bajpai, Professor Emeritus in History at Cal State Northridge, as a Content Review Panel Expert.
31 October 2005: The ad hoc committee and Dr Bajpai reviewed and approved 91 out of the over 117 corrections and edits proposed by the HEF and VF. The recommendations submitted to the CDE’s Curriculum Commission were accepted in full.
8 November 2005: Dr Michael Witzel, Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard University, sent the SBE a letter co-signed by 46 other South Asianist academics from around the world. In it, he characterised the Hindu groups proposing edits as non-specialist and their proposed edits as therefore inaccurate, and, even more damningly, as motivated by violently xenophobic nationalist and narrowly religious sentiments—dangerous threats to state-protected religious freedoms.
9 November 2005: Ruth Green, then President of the SBE, read Witzel’s letter at a SBE meeting and subsequently delayed approval of the Curriculum Commission’s proposed revisions regarding Hinduism. Soon after, the SBE created a second panel of experts consisting of Professor Witzel, Professor Wolpert of University of California-Los Angeles and Professor Heitzman of University of California-Davis.
22 November 2005: The CDE released recommendations proposed by the second expert panel. The interested Hindu groups were not allowed opportunity to comment on these revisions.
2 December 2005: The Curriculum Commission met to discuss the new revisions and submitted its recommendations to the SBE.
6 January 2006: The SBE conducted a closed-door meeting with Professors Bajpai and Witzel regarding the final proposed revisions. In the meantime, public awareness of the controversy was growing and various groups representing disparate sets of interests began to identify their positions vis-à-vis the issues. The Dalit Freedom Network, National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, the Dalit Shakti Kendra and the Dalit Solidarity Forum in the USA (notably all Indian organisations, with only the last based in the US) each wrote letters to the SBE strongly protesting any attempts by the HEF and VF to downplay caste atrocities or otherwise promote ‘benign’ representations of caste. Seventeen California women legislators wrote the SBE warning of the dangers of revisionist history writing; gender studies faculty at local colleges weighed in as well as on the ‘sanitation of history’ in silencing struggles against injustice and oppression.1 An array of groups joined in the chorus of opposition to the HEF/VF edits; most prominent among these were the Friends of South Asia (FOSA), Federation of Tamil Sangams of North America (FeTNA) and the Coalition Against Communalism (CAC). Their opposition then precipitated further public debate: the Hindu American Foundation supported the HEF/VF edits, as did many other far more loosely organised groups and individuals (academics and others) writing in to local media or directly to the SBE.
11 January 2006: The SBE created a five-member internal subcommittee to consider the issues involved. The SBE and CDE staff consulted with and considered the views of content experts to develop a recommendation on the edits.
27 February 2006: Following a public meeting at the CDE in Sacramento, the SBE subcommittee adopted a number of the Hindu groups’ suggested edits, but they did not address the groups’ most salient concerns (described above).
8–10 March 2006: The full Board of the SBE concurred with the 27 February decision that effectively rejected the HEF and VF’s controversial edits, allowing only that the Aryan Invasion Theory would be marked as ‘disputed’.
14 March 2006: The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) sought a Court injunction to stop the SBE from sending textbooks with disputed content to publishers. In response, FOSA and six other South Asian community groups (the Ambedkar Center for Justice and Peace, Campaign to Stop Funding Hate, Coalition Against Communalism, Ekta, FeTNA and the Guru Ravidass Gurdwaras of California) applied for leave to file a brief of Amici Curiae with the Superior Court in Sacramento, essentially questioning the legitimacy of the HAF to speak on behalf of all Hindus. The court eventually denied the HAF request for an injunction, though its order makes no mention of the FOSA/South Asian community brief.
16 March 2006: California Parents for Equalization of Educational Materials (CAPEEM), a group formed specifically to represent California parents on the textbook revision issue, filed a complaint in Federal Court, citing First and Fourteenth Amendment violations which may be summed up in two points: (1) the SBE did not adequately include interested Hindu groups in the review process; rather (2) the SBE implicitly endorsed Witzel’s ‘black-balling’ of Hindu concerns, thereby ‘advancing other religions while inhibiting the Hindu religion’ and promoting a fundamentally distorted and damaging representation of Hinduism in textbooks.2
25 February 2009: The court rejected all CAPEEM’s claims regarding content and dismissed the case with prejudice. Recognising CAPEEM’s grievances over insufficient representation during the review process, however, the California Attorney General ordered the SBE to compensate CAPEEM for legal costs in the amount of US$175,000.
The controversy over the content of sixth grade California public school history textbooks was one that almost did not happen: as the above timeline shows, the edits proposed by the community were on the verge of being ratified when the receipt of Michael Witzel’s letter and the academic support it rallied sparked controversy. This was not the first time that representations of Hinduism in US textbooks had been challenged by members of the Hindu community. Just about a year prior, Hindu Americans in Virginia had mounted a campaign to change the nearly caricatured way Hinduism was presented in Fairfax County school textbooks. Although the scholars consulted in that case did not always agree with the parents involved, they did concur that representations were often poor, partial and made it difficult to imagine ‘why anybody in his right mind would want to be Hindu’ (Georgetown University theology professor Ariel Glucklich, quoted in Glod, 2005: CO7). The textbook revision debate in California turned on the success of the Virginia case, emboldening other Hindu groups to seek revisions there too (Kurien, 2006: 734). The claims in California were again based on the apparently straightforward need for equitable portrayals of cultural and racial diversity, and the imperative to ‘project cultural diversity, instill in each child a sense of pride in his or her heritage, develop a feeling of self-pride and eradicate roots of prejudice’.3
Things took a considerably different turn, however, thanks to the intervention of the Sanskritist and Indologist Michael Witzel, who had himself been alerted by an Indian graduate student approached by the VF for a signature on a petition. It was Witzel’s letter to the SBE, written ‘on behalf of a long list of specialists on ancient India’ that characterised the Hindu groups’ deployment of ‘religion’ as chauvinist—shifting emphasis from a multiculturalist commitment to group rights to anxieties about the presence of intolerant groups within liberal democracy.4 The proposed edits, he wrote, ‘are not of a scholarly but of a religious-political nature and are primarily promoted by Hindutva supporters and non-specialist academics writing about these issues far outside their areas of expertise’. In putting forward an argument that linked the Hindu groups’ edits so straightforwardly to Hindutva chauvinism, Witzel paid scant attention to the functionality of ‘religion’, whether chauvinist or not, in addressing the impact of demeaning, stereotypical and even just cheeky representations of Hinduism on Hindu students in the school system, which the edits explicitly sought to address. Rather, in seeking to expose the chauvinisms that can ride on multiculturalist logics (Kurien, 2004), Witzel quite ironically leveraged another key multiculturalist construct, that of ‘cultural expertise’, to unilaterally assert the authority of ‘scholarship’ (defined apparently straightforwardly as not-politics and not-religion) in determining appropriate representations of Hinduism. His letter thus reified the distinction of ‘scholar’ to ‘practitioner’, even raising the spectre of ‘threats to religious freedom’ as defined by the US State Department in underscoring the consequences of ignoring the views of (authorised) scholars.5 Cultural expertise was presumably to be found in scholarship of the sort that Witzel and the signatories to his letter produced, not in the work of ‘Hindutva supporters and non-specialist academics writing about issues far outside their areas of expertise’.
It is then no surprise that the HAF’s rejoinder to the successive phases of rallying that followed Witzel’s letter emphasises ‘the need to take the views of practicing hindus into account’, and calls on the authority of the scholar practitioner—‘scholars who are of the faith and not secular outsiders’— in describing Hindu religious beliefs and practices. Now the question of what exactly might definitively constitute ‘Hindu praxis’, much like the question of what definitely constitutes ‘cultural expertise’, is of course sticky, not in the least transparent and ultimately cannot be generalised beyond very specific contexts. Nonetheless, ‘practice’ serves a retort to ‘expertise’; both terms function as important benchmarks in the process of determining on what authority religious histories should be written. Something called ‘sensitivity’ also becomes invaluable in marking out epistemological ground that is not accessible simply via scholarly study, but that is all the more difficult to pin down categorically. Perhaps the only thing that is clear is that the experience of ethnic embarrassment tending towards racism makes it necessary to define ‘practice’ such that a minority group can claim both political rights and the right to cultural pride within a multiculturalist setting.
The indeterminacy of the categories mobilised to this end is, however, by itself noteworthy. Precisely because terms like experience, practice and sensitivity are not spelled out, they can address and debate multiple constituencies simultaneously, whether Hindu Americans in search of authenticated dignity at the multicultural table, the benevolent multiculturalist state concerned with reaffirming diversity or those seeking to defend the boundaries of scholarship. Religion, marginalised by experience and (re-)constituted by practice then represents a way to live with and within the ‘trim precincts of a pluralist society’ (Rajagopal, 2000: 472). And ‘Hinduism’ is per force translated into a religion that must hold its own in the midst of so many other religions, at once intimately particular and broadly generalisable, pliable and strident, accessible and walled off.
Prema Kurien (2004, 2006) has argued that multiculturalism ironically and unintentionally promotes religio-ethnic nationalism in immigrant communities, raising difficult questions about who could speak most comprehensively and accurately to community interests. Along the same lines, others now worry, that the sort of reconstituted Hinduism which relies on specific (yet unspecified) notions of practice make room for Hindutva expressions in diaspora: the figure of the ‘practicing Hindu’, Natrajan avers for example, is crucial ‘for global Hindutva to exist within a liberal multicultural space’ (2009: 4). Multiculturalist doctrines provide shields against the need to acknowledge communities’ internal critiques and privilege the socially dominant. What the textbook row in California shows clearly, however, is that multiculturalism creates space not just for religio-nationalist certitudes, but for other sorts of more secular sureties as well. The problem of non-Indian (non-Hindu) representations of Hinduism in diaspora turns from a claim made to a multiculturalist state into a debate within the community or between India ‘experts’, whether academicians or others, on (1) the question of who speaks for Hindu interests; and (2) the equivalence of Hindu American ‘practice’ to Hindutva (see Natrajan, Chapter 11 in this volume). Scholars and others opposed to the HEF/VF then go about systematically connecting Hindu American organisations with Hindutva groups in India (for example, Maira and Swamy, 2006; Visweswaran et al., 2009)—so harnessing a common fear of ‘rightwing politics’ and threats to religious freedoms to ‘impugn the credentials’6 of Hindu groups and so incontrovertibly settle the debate over who can, ethically and therefore authentically, speak for Hindu interests in the diaspora. In the interests of mobilising opposition to the HEF/VF and their supporters, these writers establish the equivalence of two distinct essential notions of ‘Hinduness’—Hindu American ‘practice’ and Hindutva. The combination is potent. Eliding the differences between religious practice in the diaspora and religious nationalism in India, accurate representations of religion and ‘religious indoctrination’, the secular opposition creates a surety to match those generated by the HEF/VF in their proposed edits. The argument equating Hindu practice with Hindutva appeals directly also to the secular multiculturalist state concerned with eliminating discrimination, in terms that are recognisable to the multiculturalist state—as carrying discriminatory possibilities, as an imminent threat to religious freedoms. In this, it mobilises both a scholarly community and others (such as certain Dalit groups, gender studies academics, even non-Indian women legislators) with their own, separate agendas of opposition to Hindutva. And, in turn, it mobilises the somewhat disparate HEF, the VF and later CAPEEM into a legal alliance seeking the protections of multiculturalism along with its assurances of processual democracy.
Neither the SBE nor the California courts, however, wished to rule on who speaks to Hindu interests and therefore on what is and is not Hindutva. The SBE insisted its 27 February edits were a compromise based on scholarly differences alone, and the courts (in both the HAF and CAPEEM cases) effectively returned the debate to the community to settle, if at all possible.7 And so the debate within hangs still, with the fresh category ‘mainstream Hindus’ (presumably comprised of not-Hindutva supporters) now countering ‘practicing Hindus’, and notions of Hindu-ness recast by the fundamental ambivalences of multiculturalism, which here celebrates religious and cultural diversity, there guards against the assertions of cultural and religious groups.
Glod, Maria. 2005. ‘Wiping Stereotypes of India Off the Books’, Washington Post, 17 April, p. C7. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59613-2005Apr16.html (accessed 25 January 2011).
Kurien, Prema. 2004. ‘Multiculturalism, Immigrant Religion, and Diasporic Nationalism: The Development of an American Hinduism’, Social Problems, 53 (3): 362–85.
———. 2006. ‘Multiculturalism and “American” Religion: The Case of Hindu Indian Americans’, Social Forces, 85 (2): 723–41.
Maira, Sunaina and Raja Swamy. 2006. ‘History Hungama: The California textbook debate’, Siliconeer, VII (2). Available at http://www.siliconeer.com/past_issues/2006/february2006.html#Anchor--COV-11304 (accessed 25 January 2011).
Natrajan, Balmurli. 2009. ‘Hindutva, Hinduphobia and the “Practicing Hindu”: The Monocultural Politics of Multicultural Spaces?’ Paper presented at seminar on ‘Hindu Trans-nationalisms: Origins, Ideologies, Networks’, Rice University, 19–21 November 2009.
Rajagopal, Arvind. 2000. ‘Hindu Nationalism in the US: Changing Configurations of Political Practice’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23 (3): 407–41.
Swapan, Ashfaque. 2006. ‘Compromise Reached on California Textbook Controversy About Hinduism’, India West, 3 March. Available at http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=6d7fd82d03a4981040f985cc4f279604 (accessed 4 February 2012).
Visweswaran, Kamala, Michael Witzel, Nandini Majrekar, Dipta Bhog and Uma Chakravarti. 2009. ‘The Hindutva View of History: Rewriting Textbooks in India and the United States’, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs (Winter/Spring): 101–12.
1 Letter from Assemblywomen to the State Board of Education, 23 February 2006.
2 CAPEEM v. California SBE (06-cv-00532-FCD-KJM; Document 40), 2006: pp. 25 and 22.
3 Letter sent by the law office representing the HAF to Glee Johnson, President of the California State Board of Education, on 21 February 2006.
4 http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/witzelletter.pdf (accessed 4 February 2012). All further quotes attributed to Witzel are from this source.
5 Itself an ironic move, given that many scholars in the academy do not generally treat the US State Department’s pronouncements as unproblematic.
6 Historian J. Heitzman, quoted in an email sent out by Michael Witzel on 26 November 2005 and posted on the Sepia Mutiny blog: http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/002613.html (accessed 4 February 2012).
7 See Swapan (2006); HAF v. California State Board of Education (06CS00386), Reporter’s Transcript of 21 April 2006; CAPEEM v. California State Board of Education (2:06-CV-00532-FCD-KJM, Document 220) 2006.