In the early months of 2010, I had a brief stint with the editorial team of a Delhi-based private publishing house, which brought out school textbooks. Working in the social science section of the company, I found that a part of the job’s brief was to avoid references to what was seen as contentious or offering an alternate frame of looking at the subject of study. This meant that the end product had to be rinsed off of elements that didn’t align with the political common sense. As adjunct texts, the ‘political common sense’ found in these books was along the lines of the national curriculum. In the process, these books built their basic premises around the model textbooks published by the NCERT, a central government entity. More than other segments of social science, such an approach had its imprint on how history books unfolded the strands of narratives, eras, and developments in their pages.
