Kolkata, India – At the three-storey constructing of Sarada Shishu Vidya Mandir, a faculty for grades 5 to 10 in Uluberia city within the japanese Indian state of West Bengal, college students collect every single day on the prayer corridor quarter-hour earlier than their courses start.

The partitions within the prayer corridor are bedecked with vibrant posters of Hindu deities, saints, mythological figures, historic Indian students, kings and Hindu non secular practices. The prayer begins with the Saraswati Vandana, a chant praising Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of information.

The identical routine is adopted at Sarada Shishu Mandir, the preprimary faculty for kids to grade 4 which stands subsequent to it.

When college students enter the school rooms after the prayers, they encounter the identical historic figures but once more – in a sequence of books known as Sanskriti Bodhmala, or cultural consciousness manuals, revealed in English, Hindi and several other different Indian languages. The Sanskriti Bodhmala books are necessary for the scholars of courses 4 to 12, who additionally should take a nationally coordinated annual take a look at based mostly on these books.

For greater than two centuries, tens of millions of Indians, particularly Hindus, have lengthy learn concerning the concepts and philosophies attributed to historic students from what is named the Vedic period (1500 BC to 500 BC), when most of the faith’s scriptures had been written.

But beneath Prime Minister Narendra Modi, many of those ideas have made their means into India’s huge formal education system, blurring the lines between non secular Hindu beliefs on the one hand and established historical past and science on the opposite.

In a rustic the place half the inhabitants is youthful than 25, this, say critics, has given Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and their Hindu majoritarian companions the flexibility to make use of pedagogy to affect the minds of tens of millions of younger Indians – a lot of whom will probably be voting for the primary time in nationwide elections anticipated to be held between March and May.

Atoms to aviation

Vedic-era thinker Kanada was the world’s first atomic scientist, say the books meant for the scholars of courses 4 and 6.

Kanada, in his guide Vaisheshika Darshan, did write about anu (atoms) being the smallest particles of gear that can’t be additional divided. But the substances he listed – prithvi (earth), jala (water), tejas (fireplace), vayu (air), akasha (ether), kala (time), dik (area), atma (soul) and manas (thoughts) — make it clear, say scientists, that he was talking in philosophical or metaphysical phrases.

The class 5 textbook tells them that Vedic sage Bharadwaja, who’s credited with writing the guide Vymaanika Shastra (Science of Aeronautics), was the “father of aviation”. The class 5 and sophistication 12 books name historic Indian doctor Sushruta “the inventor of plastic surgery”.

The Sanskriti Bodhmala books usually are not permitted by the federal government. But they’ve been taught along with the state-approved syllabus for many years in a big chain of colleges run by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the far-right ideological mentor of the BJP.

The colleges are formally operated by Vidya Bharati, the training wing of the RSS, which controls greater than 12,000 such colleges catering to just about 32 million college students throughout India. The colleges are affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) or the federal government training boards of the states they’re situated in.

In latest years, unsubstantiated historical and scientific claims – being taught in Vidya Bharati colleges – have made their means into the formal syllabus of state-run colleges.

The claims of Kanada’s atomic principle and Sushruta’s cosmetic surgery are already part of the curriculum of the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) – an training board managed by the federal authorities. The NIOS describes itself as “the largest open schooling system in the world with a cumulative enrolment of 4.13 million [during last five years]” college students.

The NIOS curriculum additionally encourages college students to search out out about Vedic arithmetic – one other topic taught particularly at RSS colleges.

The National Council of Educational Research and Training’s (NCERT) new module on India’s moon mission says the guide Vymaanika Shaastra “seemingly reveals that our civilisation had the knowledge of flying vehicles”.

The NCERT is the apex physique advising the federal and state governments on faculty training, together with mannequin textbooks. However, varied state training boards might differ from NCERT’s recommendation and pursue their very own syllabus. Among federal authorities boards, CBSE had 1.2 million college students showing within the grade 12 exams and 1.8 million college students showing within the grade 10 exams in 2020.

In 2019, federal Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal mentioned, “Our scriptures mentioned the concept of gravity much before Newton discovered it.” Sanskriti Bodhmala books say the identical, one in all its books attributing it to fifth-century mathematician Aryabhatta and one other to Twelfth-century mathematician Bhaskaracharya.

“The Sanskriti Bodhmala books have no conflict with the formal syllabus, as the history presented here is entirely missing in the existing formal syllabus, which thoroughly neglects India’s pre-Mughal history. That is where we stress on,” Proloy Adhikary, accountable for Uluberia’s Sarada Vidya Mandir, informed Al Jazeera.

He mentioned the National Education Policy (NEP) that the Modi authorities has launched had been carried out in Vidya Bharati colleges for a number of years now.

“The NEP has taken some of our schools’ practices to the broader sphere,” he mentioned, hoping for extra data from the Sanskriti Bodhmala books to search out their means into the formal nationwide faculty syllabus.

‘Glorious culture’

Vidya Bharati says its cultural consciousness examination for college kids was launched of their colleges “with a view to transmitting a glorious culture to the new generation”.

Debangshu Kumar Pati, a Vidya Bharati official in West Bengal, claimed the contents of their books are well-researched. “We inform students of the history that the colonialist and Marxist historians have suppressed to make generations of Hindus feel inferior,” he informed Al Jazeera.

But historians – not simply Marxists amongst them – in addition to scientists and different critics have accused the Modi authorities of altering faculty syllabi to go well with their Hindu nationalist agenda.

Hilal Ahmed, affiliate professor of historical past at New Delhi’s Centre for the Studies of Developing Societies (CSDS), informed Al Jazeera nobody may be blamed for telling new histories “as the discovery of the past always lies in the future – as long as proper historiographical methods are followed”.

“Since history writing is a complex process, serious historians have evolved methods and protocols, including the requirements to verify the veracity of the sources, introducing the sources, and explaining how the information is being interpreted and connections are being made. But these schools don’t follow the protocol of citing serious history,” he mentioned.

Ahmed thinks the Sanskriti Bodhmala textbooks current historical past as if they’ve found “the final truth of the past”, calling them “anti-student”.

“They introduce a kind of pedagogy that would not allow the students to draw their own meanings of the past. The students would be hostile to other renditions of history. They are being prevented from thinking of the past afresh in the future,” he mentioned.

Jayant Vishnu Narlikar, one in all India’s best-known cosmologists, debunked many such claims in his 2003 guide, The Scientific Edge: The Indian Scientist from Vedic to Modern Times. Most claims about fashionable scientific discoveries having a Vedic origin “do not stand up to scientific scrutiny”, Narlikar wrote, including: “That they were curious about the universe is beyond doubt. But that they knew what modern science talks about today cannot be accepted.”

In 2023, when Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chief S Somanath claimed that main scientific developments in branches like metallurgy, astrology, astronomy, aeronautical sciences, and physics happened in historic India and had been later taken to Europe by the Arabs, Breakthrough Science Society (BSS) issued a press release, asking, “If superior knowledge in astronomy, aeronautical engineering, etc., is available in the ancient texts in Sanskrit, why isn’t the ISRO using them?”

“Can he [Somanath] show one piece of technology or theory that ISRO has taken from the Vedas and applied to make a rocket or a satellite?” the assertion requested. The BSS is a Kolkata-based group of rationalist scientists.

From fringe to mainstream

Vidya Bharati’s function in pushing a sure type of historical past is an element of a bigger venture of what critics have known as the “saffronisation” of education, after the favoured color of the Hindu proper. It is a course of pursued by the Modi authorities and the establishments managed by it.

The Sanskriti Bodhmala books are revealed by Vidya Bharati Sanskriti Shiksha Sansthan, whose former president, Govind Prasad Sharma, served on the BJP authorities’s National Curriculum Framework’s steering committee shaped in 2021.

Of the 25 focus teams the state-run NCERT shaped to develop the National Curriculum Framework, based mostly on which new textbooks for presidency colleges had been written, 5 had Vidya Bharati officers as members.

According to Vidya Bharati’s nationwide president D Ramakrishna Rao, “senior and retired teachers” of their colleges had been being picked up as useful resource individuals in lots of Indian states for writing textbooks for presidency colleges.

“Vidya Bharati has been putting its all-out efforts and providing unstinted support to the government at the [education] policy preparation stage for almost five years,” Rao wrote in a column for a right-wing web site in 2021.

Some of their colleges’ principals and workplace bearers are members of the committee for the event of the National Professional Standards for Teachers, and nearly each state process power for the implementation of the NEP included their representatives who “actively monitor” the method, Rao added.

‘Catch the Hindu minds young’

Between 1999 and 2004, when the BJP shaped its first-ever federal authorities, the same effort to alter faculty curriculum was made.

A key identify to emerge for that venture was Dinanath Batra, then Vidya Bharati’s basic secretary. Shortly after Modi got here to nationwide energy in 2014, his residence state Gujarat made Batra’s books necessary in authorities colleges.

Batra is a pioneer amongst Hindu nationalist historians, although globally acclaimed historians akin to Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib accuse him of turning each historical past and geography into fantasy.

Journalist Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, who has authored a number of books on Hindu nationalism, and has a biography of Modi, informed Al Jazeera the Vidya Bharati colleges are a part of the RSS’s bigger technique of making hegemony over all walks of life, together with training.

Mukhopadhyay mentioned the concept behind the RSS working such a big community of colleges throughout the nation is to “catch the Hindu minds young and instil the idea of ancient Hindu invincibility, a past when Hindu India was the dominant race all over the world and that the golden bird of Indian civilisation was destroyed by thousands of years of slavery, first in the hands of Muslims and then the [Christian] colonial powers”.

He mentioned Modi’s rule has given the Hindu nationalists “their best chance to restore that ancient glory of global Hindu superiority”.

“If you instil such thoughts in children’s minds, they will grow up with a tremendous amount of anger against Muslims and Christians. Such information attempts to create a constant state of paranoia in Hindu minds about the entire world being a conspirator against Hindu supremacy,” he mentioned.