“I enjoy (historical) controversies in a kind of perverse way, perhaps,” Michel Danino said during his lecture at Azim Premji University in October last year. Arguing that “historical controversies” are inherent part of the discipline, he said: “We should not shun controversies, we should desire them. We should make use of them to go deeper into issues.”
Danino, who heads the panel on the NCERT social science textbooks, is no stranger to row. He has delved into subjects, that have generated heat in academic and political circles for decades, which include questions related to the Aryan invasion – in his writings and lectures he rejects it – and the Sarasvati river, which he terms the “life-giving river” of the “Indus-Sarasvati civilisation” or the Harappan civilisation.
Recently, the NCERT’s new social science textbooks sparked a row over various matters including their portrayal of Mughal and Delhi Sultanate periods in a negative light, the omission of Tipu Sultan and the Anglo-Mysore wars over resistance to the East India Company, and a map showing a large swathe of the country and beyond, including Rajasthan belts, as part of the Maratha empire.
In his response to criticism against these books, Danino, 69, who is currently also a guest professor at IIT Gandhinagar, told The Indian Express: “Criticism is welcome, but the strident criticism that this is communalisation of education…or sometimes people say my clan, my hero is missing…that’s not acceptable. Things are going to be missing, how is it possible to cover everything? We take representative figures, and try to select them in a way that bears significance across India,” he said.
While the new NCERT books have brought him into the limelight again, the French-born Danino, who was awarded the Padma Shri in 2017, was once, in his words, “on the margins of academia”.
In France, he studied maths, physics and engineering. While he enjoyed science, he felt it didn’t have “answers to the major issues”.
In the early 1970s, he got interested in Indian spirituality, Sri Aurobindo, and the “Mother” (Mirra Alfassa, who established Auroville in Pondicherry).
“It was in the air – there was information going around (on Sri Aurobindo and Auroville). There was a famous short movie on French TV by a well-known filmmaker. Auroville started in 1968, and there were people already working there. It attracted me because of Sri Aurobindo’s vision of human unity – that human unity would be possible only with a very substantial transformation of human nature. I landed in Auroville in 1977,” said Danino.
Deciding to spend his life in India then, Danino started translating, editing, and publishing texts related to Aurobindo and the “Mother”.
He was drawn to Aurobindo’s ideas on Indian civilisation and its ancient past. “In his writings, he (Aurobindo) brought up what used to be called the ‘genius of Indian civilisation’. He was convinced that going back to those roots could help us meet the challenges of today and tomorrow much better. This led me to further exploration of Indian civilisation. I looked at the literature available, and got in touch with archaeologists, historians, scholars on the history of science and technology. It may have been a slightly disorganised exploration; I was not chasing any academic degree,” Danino said.
His “cursory readings” then became systematic, and he began to take part in conferences, and present and publish papers too.
He went on to give three series of lectures at IIT Kanpur – one in 2010 on the “Indus-Sarasvati civilisation, Harappan-Gangetic cultural and technological continuity, and early landmarks of science and technology in India”; second in 2011 on India’s scientific and technological heritage; and third one in 2014 on “Exploring Indian civilisation”. Danino was then scholar-in-residence at the IIT Kanpur.
These lectures caught the attention of Prof Sudhir Jain, the founding director of IIT Gandhinagar. “Someone told me that there is a French-origin scholar who had gone to IIT Kanpur to give lectures, and the audience numbers increased every day. I was intrigued, and we invited him,” Prof Jain said.
Danino began as guest professor at IIT Gandhinagar in 2011, helped set up the Archaeological Sciences Centre at the institute, coordinated an Indian Knowledge Systems discipline, and offered courses such as “Perspectives on Indian Civilisation”.
“I had asked him (Danino) to help me build on a subject that we are not doing too well in India. After some conversation, we decided on archaeological science. He knew everybody in the archaeological community. He is a very rational friend and guide,” Prof Jain said.
An IIT Kanpur faculty member said, “We found him (Danino) to be very logical, scholarly. Whenever he had a point to make, he would look at it from multiple perspectives, and then conclude.”
In his 2014 lecture at the IIT Kanpur, Danino said the theory of Aryans’ migration to India, their domination over local populations, and their move to “import” the Sanskrit language, Vedas, and a social order based on the caste system formed a crucial question for determining whether these aspects of the Indian civilisation were indigenous or not.
He stated that the Rig Veda did not make any reference to a “distant homeland” from where the “Vedic people” migrated to India, and that there was no notion of an “Aryan people” in the text. He also pointed to topographic surveys by British officials as well as French geographer Louis Vivien de Saint-Martin’s work to claim that the present-time Ghaggar-Hakra river must have been a relic of the Sarasvati river which dried up around 1900 BC, which contributed to the Indus Valley civilisation’s end.
He concluded that the people who composed the Rig Veda hymns would have been from a time before the Sarasvati dried up since the hymns praised the river as “flowing unbroken to the sea”.
In 1996 too, he wrote, in a published piece titled “The Invasion that Never Was”, that the Rig Veda contained references consistent with the “Indus-Sarasvati” or “Sindhu-Sarasvati” civilisation from 3500 BC to 1900 BC, whose concentration, he added, was on Sarasvati’s dry bed. The new NCERT social science textbook for class 6, released last year, refers to it as the “Sindhu-Sarasvati” civilisation.
“Historians who accepted the (Aryan) invasion theory felt compelled to conclude that this civilisation was pre-Aryan and therefore pre-Vedic…no findings have been made in the Indus-Sarasvati region, pointing to the Aryan people coming into India…” Danino wrote, adding that the civilisation was Vedic. “Nothing has been dug out of six-thousand-year-old soil that shows a break with Vedic culture as it still exists in India under its present form of Hinduism.”
Such a conclusion has been contested by several historians, though. Romila Thapar stated, in her paper titled “The Theory of Aryan Race and India: History and Politics’ (1996), that “A group of people, close to and involved with the founding of the RSS and writing in the early twentieth century, developed the concept of Hindutva or Hinduness and argued that this was essential to the identity of the Indian…The argument ran that the original Hindus were the Aryans, a distinctive people indigenous to India. Caste Hindus or Hindu Aryas are their descendants. There was no Aryan invasion since the Aryans were indigenous to India and therefore no confrontation among the people of India.”
Historian Irfan Habib, in his paper “Imagining River Sarasvati: A Defence of Common sense”, wrote that the Sarasvati, in most Rig Veda references, was not a particular river, but a “river in the abstract, the River Goddess”.
In his lecture at Azim Premji University, however, Danino, who has also written a book on Sarasvati titled “The Lost River: On the trail of the Sarasvati”, said that “there is nothing mythical about the descriptions (of the Sarasvati) in texts” and that the identification of the Ghaggar-Hakra with the Sarasvati was not a “Hindutva invention” but was made by geographer Saint-Martin.
Now, referring to his NCERT panel, Danino said it was mandated to develop the social science textbooks within the framework of the National Education Policy 2020 as well as the National Curriculum Framework for School Education 2023. Danino had also been a member of the National Steering Committee on the Curriculum Frameworks as well as the Indian Council of Historical Research.
On the new textbooks, he said: “In some of our workshops initially, I said we’ll get brickbats when the textbooks are out. And I even declared my objective was to get equal brickbats from both sides of the spectrum so that we will know we have done a good job. And ironically, that’s almost what’s happening.”
“People make the fundamental mistake of comparison. They think we are here just to revise the old textbooks, and then they say we’ve dropped this chapter, and added that,” he said.
Danino said that since the new curriculum involves having a single social science book instead of separate ones for subjects like history, geography, and political science, “we have limited space”. So, he added, “We try to focus on what is really important that we would like our students to remember, if possible, all their life.”
“People complain about our treatment of the Mughal Empire, but after all, it has the best part of the whole chapter, which from our point of view is a lot of space. We have this view that some of these topics are going to be taken up again in the secondary stage,” he said.
Danino, who is based in Tamil Nadu, also said: “The least genuine criticism is that we are writing under the gaze of ideological movements like the RSS and so on. And this is completely false. We have never felt any undue influence. People are not willing to believe that because it’s a convenient argument to dismiss the whole effort without seriously looking at it. We have not said that the textbooks are perfect. How can they be perfect? It’s the first attempt and done in a short time. They have to be revised and looked at afresh from year to year.”
In his Azim Premji University lecture, Danino had said: “In schools, it (history) is the least interesting discipline. And yet, it is the discipline that triggers the loudest controversies in the public arena. Why is it that such an uninteresting discipline should be so present and so intense? The answer is that history is what shapes our identity.”