Educating India's Muslims

The problem of education for the minorities in India has always been a vexing one, and the education of Muslims especially so. As long ago as 1886, the astute and far-sighted Sir Syed Ahmad Khan set up the All-India Muslim Educational Conference with the specific intention of addressing, and hopefully, solving the problem of education among Indian Muslims and encouraging, in particular, the study of western sciences and literature among them. Sir Syed was among the first in the community to view education as a tool of empowerment and as a means of bringing Muslims into the national mainstream. It is a different matter that he too chose to concentrate upon the Muslim men and it was left to Shaikh Abdullah to begin the Girls College at Aligarh in 1906

From the earliest days of formal education for Muslims, there was the commensurate issue of appropriate curricula, textbooks, primers, readers and other resource material. Since only a handful chose, or could afford, the English medium of education, for the vast majority Urdu was the language of communication. Men of the caliber of Munshi Zakaullah and Master Ram Chander of the Dilli College, Shibli Nomani and Professor T. W. Arnold at Aligarh and Maulvi Abdul Haq, the Baba-e-Urdu then busy in setting up the Anjuman-e-Tarraqui-e-Urdu at Hyderbabad, applied their mind to the preparation of school curriculum and Urdu textbooks. In 1920, the Urdu Translation Board was set up under the chairmanship of Shaikh Abdul Qadir, a professor of Persian, at the Deccan College to prepare Urdu readers for primary schools. Enlightened Hindus such as Tej Bahadur Sapru and the educationist Dr Tara Chand expressed support and solidarity. In the 1930s, the UP Government set up a Hindustani Academy under the patronage of Tara Chand to promote Urdu literature and, by extension, encourage translations and the production of better quality educational materials.

Madrasas

However, ever since partition, the state of Urdu textbooks has only steadily deteriorated, and things reached such a pass that only the most desperately destitute or the most fanatically idealistic of Indian Muslim parents began to send their offspring to the tender mercies of the madrasa system of education. A popular myth about Muslims is that they refuse to opt for secular education and prefer only madrasa education and madrasa education makes them religious fanatics. This flies in the face of not just common sense but also statistics -- according to the Sachar Committee Report only 4% of all enrolled Muslim children go to madrasas; 66% go to government schools and 30% to private institutions. No middle class persons send their children to madrasas; it is only poor Muslims who cannot afford secular education or happen to live in areas where the State, whose duty it is to provide primary education, fails to do so that children are sent to madrasas. In fact, the cause of lack of secular education is poverty, not religion. But so popular is this myth that madrasa education is ascribed to religious fanaticism and orthodoxy rather than to poverty. Those involved in the education of the Muslim girl child have not been able to reach any consensus on the sort of education to be given to the Muslim girl and ambivalences persist about the merits of Deeni Taalim vs Duniyawi Taleem. What is clear, however, is that a majority of Muslim parents wish to send their girls to an Urdu-medium school, preferably one in their neighbourhood so that the girls are not put to ‘risk’. This brings us back to the issue of textbooks and the importance of not just education per se but the quality and content of education. It cannot be over emphasised that literacy alone is not the key. It will not magically open the doors of opportunity. The quality of education is just as important.

Alarm bells rang all across the country when in the course of surveys during the BJP government’s tenure, school textbooks were found to contain anomalies, misinformation and outright falsehoods. Erosion of secular values, a long-term objective of the sangh parivar, had made its insidious way into textbooks through the right-winger’s slogan of ‘one country, one people, one culture’. The Curricular Framework of School Education 2000, hammered out by the NCERT (National Council for Educational Research and Training, the country’s apex educational body) substituted ‘value education’ for moral education. Educationists also noted with alarm that the state of Urdu textbooks, neglected for far too long, amounted to a national shame. With virtually no monitoring of what went into these textbooks, the education being imparted through them was dubious, if not actually harmful.

Textbooks

Fortunately this alarming state of affairs was set right by the feisty Arjun Singh, Minister of Human Resource Development who launched a ‘de-saffronisation’ programme virtually from the day of assuming office. As part of his ambitious cleaning of the Aegean Stables was a reworked – and far more inclusive and holistic -- National Curriculum Framework and more significantly, translation of ALL school textbooks prepared by the NCERT into Urdu. What is more, the NCERT, under instructions from the Ministry of HRD, took urgent steps to ‘de-toxify’ the history and social science textbooks where a great deal of damage had been done by the previous regime. The country’s best and ablest historians and social scientists gave freely of their time and resources to craft intelligently-written yet accessible textbooks that took into account issues of gender, ethnicity, minority rights, etc. What is more, for the first time, the illustrations that accompanied these newly-designed books were also culturally sensitive. Care was taken to show children without any appendages of caste, creed, colour or religion playing and interacting freely. At the same time, minority names appeared far more frequently and in completely mainstream situations than ever before.

The NCERT’s English textbooks had been translated into Urdu before, but lackadaisically, sporadically and unimaginatively. Under Arjun Singh’s mandate the task of preparing Urdu textbooks, under the supervision of the NCERT, got a shot in the arm. The Jamia Millia Islamia, with its tradition of encouraging Urdu-medium education through feeder schools, was given the task of translating all the NCERT textbooks into Urdu. As Coordinator of this mammoth project, my task was to find a suitable person from the target subject who was equally proficient in, say Chemistry or Sociology or Psychology, and also in written Urdu and who was, moreover, willing to forsake his/her summer vacation to produce these books in time when schools re-open at the end of summer. In the course of two years, we translated books from Class I-XII in subjects ranging from math, business administration, economics, commerce, apart from the usual science, social science, etc.

My brief to the translators was to be accurate and as close to he original as possible. At the same time, the challenge lay in using a language that was felicitous as well as faithful. We were conscious also that some of these students, especially from the senior classes and those who were studying core subjects, should be able to make the transition to university-level education in English should they so choose. This was especially tricky when it came to scientific terms, coinages, proper nouns, etc. We were aware that these books would be used in a variety of Urdu-medium schools – government-run, privately-owned as well as affiliated and non-affiliated madrasas, and many of the end-users would be first-generation literates with no family support-systems to fall back upon that can make school leaning more accessible. We therefore, chose to keep the language as simple as possible but included a glossary for technical terms and generous footnotes for explanations. We don’t know how successful we were but we took heart from the fact that the NCERT made no compromises in the production of these Urdu books. For the first time in living memory, children across the country – those that study NCERT books – would be reading books designed within a national curriculum framework that took into account the sensitivities of all Indians, written by the finest area experts, printed on good quality, high-grammage paper, designed by the finest graphic designers and illustrators. While it is not mandatory or compulsory for all schools to prescribe only NCERT books, nor is it essential that Urdu-medium schools prescribe the Urdu textbooks created by NCERT, at the very least these books are available. That in itself is a cause for joy