A lot of ink has been spilt on the National Council of Educational and Research Training (NCERT)’s omission of certain details about the Mughals, among others, from the Class 12 text book. The NCERT said the portions overlapped with the material covered in previous classes and were omitted for brevity.
Editorial | Right lessons: on the lack of professionalism in the NCERT’s deletions in textbooks
It is widely believed that our understanding of history comes from textbooks. This is not entirely the case. As with most social sciences, our knowledge of history comes from lived experience. This includes what we read in fiction or non-fiction or from the Internet; what we watch on television or cinema; what we are told by our friends and family either in person or via social media; what we see of history in our daily experience in the form of monuments or ruins; and the material objects we interact with such as heirloom jewellery or clothes or food. The stories told to us by our families, the meals we eat, and the clothes we wear, the places we visit all come together to create the foundation of our working knowledge of history. This is not to disparage the role of the history textbook in education.
