History Retold for Child Readers
Nivedita Sen
A HISTORY OF INDIA FOR CHILDREN by Subhadra Sen Gupta Rupa Publications, New Delhi, 2015, 452 pp., 500
November 2015, volume 39, No 11

The blurb at the back of Subhadra Sengupta’s A History of India for Children clarifies that it is sufficiently updated with the relatively recent approach to the study of history. ‘History is … about how ordinary people lived—the houses they lived in, the food they ate, the clothes they wore and what the children studied in school … it is the story of our past.’ Such a sensitization has also marked the rewriting of history textbooks in schools. My generation that grew up reading History as a subject in school in the late sixties and seventies recalls how we were subjected to memorizing the eight-fold path of Buddha, the dates of various feats during the reign of the Mughal dynasty, points on why Mohammad bin Tughlak failed as a ruler and the like, and therefore found it very irksome. The present generation is lucky to have escaped such a tedious, fact-filled chronicling of Indian history. Instead, children today who have to go through the compulsory capsules of Indian history all the way up to Class 12 have refreshing topics for study like the history of cricket, how the English language gradually became an official Indian language in India or an analysis of how and why certain fashions and sartorial habits grew in certain places. NCERT textbooks on History, credited with having revamped the entire system, however, are still guilty of recounting history in a kind of language that children find very boring.

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