A group of 41 prominent scholars, including several Indian-Americans from across the US have written to the California Department of Education opposing proposals to change "India" to "South Asia" in the state text books.
Signed by distinguished academics such as Barbara McGraw of Saint Mary's College of California, Diana Eck of Harvard University and Gerald James Larson of Indiana University, the letter called for a "representation of India and Hinduism that is consistent with the manner in which other cultures and religions are portrayed, and one which avoids Eurocentric biases".
In the letter dated May 5, this group of academicians under the name 'Social Science and Religion Faculty Group' (SSRFG) termed the recommendations to use "South Asia" in place of ancient India "anachronistic" and "not historical".
A copy of the letter accompanied a statement.
The group argued that the term "South Asia" is a post World War II geopolitical designation to account for the breakup of British India.
The academics pointed out that textbook narrative "refers to all other ancient geographical areas by their ancestral terms China, Japan, Egypt, Greece, etc". Only "India" is recommended for a change".
Earlier this year, the California Department of Education's (CDE) Instructional Quality Commission (IQC) had proposed to accept several changes to the textbook framework suggested by another group of academics named 'South Asia Faculty Group' (SAFG), the statement said.
The suggestions included replacing references to 'India' before 1947 with "South Asia" and "Hinduism" with "ancient Indian religions.
The group was led by academics Kamala Visweswaran of University of California, San Diego, and Robert Goldman of University of California, Berkeley, it added.
In its seven-page letter, SSRFG questioned these edits and said that SAFG's views did not constitute scholarly consensus as claimed by the latter.
The academics of SSRFG while welcoming "robust academic debate about the politics of India" in the academia cautioned that the debate is not "appropriately addressed in a K-12 textbook Framework narrative in California".
Calling into question the suggestion to replace the word "Hinduism" with "ancient Indian religions" the letter said "if anyone were to argue that Hinduism did not exist then as what we today refer to as "Hinduism", that would be an unfounded erasure of history on the grounds of semantics," said a statement issued on behalf of SSRFG.
Meanwhile, Harvard scholar Nathan Glazer has also called for using the term "India" for ancient Indian civilisation.
Writing as a response to the debate in New York Times he
said, "for ancient India, as known to the classical Greeks and to Alexander, and to Greek and Roman geographers, to Portuguese adventurers, to 17th and 18th century British, French and Dutch merchants, to British imperialists, what other term, or some equivalent, would serve? They could not conceive of it as "South Asia".
"They knew it as a distinctive civilisation, stretching from the Indus to the Ganges, from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean (and should we change that name, too?), with its own ancient languages, and classic texts, and religions descended from them," Glazer wrote.
The California Department of Education (CDE)'s Instructional Quality Commission (IQC) will be hearing the matter on May 19th where it would finalise its framework narrative for its school textbooks.
The narrative would be submitted to the State Board of Education (SBE) for its approval later this year, the press statement said.
