“Mr Batra is not the first man to claim that planes were invented in ancient India because our epics refer to them. That’s because people like Mr Batra do not have the imagination to credit our ancient writers with imagination: if a writer described flight hundreds of years ago, it was not because he had witnessed a plane taking off, but because he imagined people in flight. Writers of science fiction take their characters through time and space, not because they have seen this happening, but because they have let their imagination soar. Only the literalists are capable of believing that what is written is proof of having been witnessed.” – Anil Dharker
If you care about India’s children, prepare to shed a tear now. If you care about Gujarat’s children, prepare to cry buckets now. Because Dinanath Batra, ace scholar, perfervid activist, slayer of Donigers, is a revered figure in the schools of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s motherland.
Mr Batra’s office-cum-residence, however, is not in Gujarat but in Delhi. It is located in Saraswati Bal Mandir, a school affiliated to Bharatiya Vidyapeeth. The lift plays music, but it’s not the usual muzzak or distortions of Mozart, but the Gayatri Mantra. His own room is dominated by portraits of Maharana Pratap, Swami Vivekananda, Chanakya — who are the real heroes of India he says, yet haven’t got their due. He sees it as his mission to correct this. Actually, it’s only part of his mission. He wants to completely overhaul our system of education, which is “distorted by Marx and Macaulay.” This is almost a Modism. (A real Modism would be “mauled by Marx and Macaulay”.) The proposed overhaul of the curriculum embraces every possible subject.
If you remember your days at school, almost the first thing you did in geography class was to learn to draw a map of India. Dinanath Batra’s students would have to relearn the basics, because Mr Batra’s India would not be the truncated version we live in now, but the glorious Bharat of old, the Akhand Bharat of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh which includes Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, and unless I am mistaken, even Burma.
Mr Batra’s erudition covers every possible subject:
- Aeronautics: “Pushpak Viman, a flying chariot used by Lord Rama, was the first aeroplane in the world”.
- Mathematics: “Vedic maths is the real mathematics and must be taught in schools”.
- Medicine: “When the royal couple couldn’t produce an heir, they were asked to do gai puja, and their cow devotion helped them beget a son”.
All this stems from his belief that “we must reject English education and revert to our ancient languages.” We should reject Western education because it has not given our ancient wisdom its due. “Our rishis were scientists,” Mr Batra says, “Whose inventions in the fields of technology, medicine, science have been appropriated by the West.” So he doesn’t want children to celebrate birthdays by blowing candles on cakes, an imported idea, but by wearing swadeshi, taking part in a havan, reciting the Gayatri Mantra and feeding cows. The Books of Batra have many such pearls of wisdom. There are nine books, all made supplementary reading for schools in Gujarat, and to encourage the reading of which free copies are being distributed to 35,000 government schools. Mr Batra has his ideas on creating an ideal society, too: “Keeping a good friend circle is not enough. To keep it faultless, a good company is also required. This means a company of saints and learned people. The student that goes to a RSS shakha daily, he finds miraculous change in his life.”
Mr Batra is not the first man to claim that planes were invented in ancient India because our epics refer to them. That’s because people like Mr Batra do not have the imagination to credit our ancient writers with imagination: if a writer described flight hundreds of years ago, it was not because he had witnessed a plane taking off, but because he imagined people in flight. Writers of science fiction take their characters through time and space, not because they have seen this happening, but because they have let their imagination soar. Only the literalists are capable of believing that what is written is proof of having been witnessed.
Sadly for the student going to Gujarat government schools, Mr Batra is not alone in his looniness. A 125-page book called Tejomay Bharat, not written by him has also been mandated along with Mr Batra’s, as supplementary reading for all government primary and secondary schools. Here are some passages from it: “What we know today as the motorcar existed during the Vedic period. It was called anashva rath. Usually a rath (chariot) is pulled by horse, but an anashva rath means the one that runs without horses or yantra rath, what is today motorcar. The Rig Veda refers to this…”
“We know that television was invented by a priest from Scotland called John Logie Baird in 1926. But we want to take you to an even older Doordarshan…. Indian rishis using their yog vidya would attain divya drishti. There is no doubt that the invention of television goes back to this…. In Mahabharata, Sanjay sitting inside a palace in Hastinapur and using his ‘divya shakti’ would give a live telecast of the battle of Mahabharata … to the blind Dhritarashtra”
“America wants to take the credit for invention of stem cell research but the truth is that India’s Dr Balkrishna Ganpat Matapurkar has already got a patent for regenerating body parts…. You would be surprised to know that this research is not new and that Dr Matapurkar was inspired by the Mahabharata. Kunti had a bright son like Sun itself. When Gandhari, who was not conceiving for two years, learnt of this, she underwent hysterectomy. From her womb a huge mass of flesh came out. (Rishi) Dwaipayan Vyas was called. He observed this hard mass of flesh and then he preserved it in a cold tank with specific medicines. He then divided the mass of flesh into 100 parts and kept them separately in 100 tanks full of ghee for two years. After two years, 100 Kauravas were born of it. On reading this he (Matapurkar) realised that stem cell was not his invention. This was found in India thousands of years ago.”
This book’s content adviser is Harshad Shah, vice-chancellor of Children’s University in Gandhinagar and former Gujarat chairman of Vidya Bharati. By the way, Tejomay Bharat objects to our country being called India. It says, “We should not demean ourselves by calling our beloved Bharatbhoomi by the shudra (lowly) name ‘India’. What right had the British to change the name of this country? … We should not fall for this conspiracy and forget the soul of our country.”
Mr Shah at least is from Gujarat. How does Mr Batra from Delhi exert such a strong influence on that state’s education system? And what are Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s views on this?
Could they be any different from the views expressed in the following two passages?
“It is congratulatory that Gujarat State Board of School Textbooks is publishing writer Dinanath Batraji’s literature. It is hoped that this inspirational literature will inspire students and teachers…. Seeds of values which are sown in the childhood emerge with time like a large banyan tree of idealism. Then it becomes possible to build a citizenship based on character and intelligence”
We should be surprised if the Prime Minister’s views are too different. After all, the two passages above are from the forewords of two books by Mr Batra. The forewords are by Mr Modi when he was the chief minister of Gujarat. – The Asian Age, 30 July 2014
» Anil Dharker serves as head of the National Film Development Corporation and as a film critic and novelist. He is a columnist for many of India’s leading newspapers such as The Times of India, The Economic Times, Mid-day, The Hindu and DNA. At various stages in his life, he has been an engineer, a film critic, a film censor and a promoter of New Cinema.
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