The change is part of a sweeping syllabus overhaul recommended by a committee appointed by the Suvendu Adhikari government in July this year, which also decided to insert the life of Hindu nationalist icon Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee and cut portions on Mughal rule and Marxist philosophy.
In Bengali language textbooks for government schools across West Bengal, water will soon be ‘ jol , never ‘ paani ’, and a father will be ‘baba’ , not “ abba ”.
“We usually don’t use these words while speaking in Bengali. “We were taught that Aryans ‘brought civilisation with them’ to India and it was they who brought chariots and horses with them. But recent excavations at Sinauli in Uttar Pradesh and Rakhigarhi in Haryana have helped to challenge this theory. “While iconic poems and plays such as Rabindranath Tagore’s Shivaji Utsav and Dwijendralal Roy’s Mewar Patan (Fall of Mewar) have been included in the books, the play on Siraj-ud-Daulah has been dropped.
Because they were working against a tight deadline, chatterjee said the committee avoided major changes to the textbooks.
Kalyani University professor Debashis Chatterjee, who heads the syllabus and curriculum review committee, said words such as ‘ paani ’, ‘ abba ’ and ‘ ammi ’ would be dropped from Bengali-language school textbooks. Instead, words which we use every day, such as ‘jol’, ‘baba’ ‘ma’ will be used,” he told HT. These latest facts will be included in history books,” Chatterjee said. A senior committee official said portions on Mughal history, chapters on British colonial history in India and those on Marxism have been curtailed from the history books. Also, Tagore’s poem ‘Africa’ has been dropped,” the official said.
West Bengal chief minister Suvendu Adhikari said on October 25 that the state government was revamping the school education system and had yet to receive the syllabus-cum-curriculum committee’s final report.
Adhikari also said the government may prohibit use of mobile phones in schools, abolish the no-detention policy, and reintroduce the National Cadet Corps (NCC) scheme in schools.
