History Education and redefining of Indian identity in the United States

Abstract

History education holds a significant place in the lives of the Hindu nationalist diaspora in the United States. It serves as a tool for cultural preservation, ideological propagation, and political mobilization. Moreover, it plays a crucial role in knowledge production, shaping the narratives that define community identity and influence broader academic and public discourses. This paper contextualizes the California textbook controversies (2005-2006 and 2017-18) in which two groups, the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu Educational Foundation, lobbied to change the content of the sections on ancient India in sixth-grade history/social science textbooks. In a multicultural society like the United States, one aspect of the public sphere where minorities seek to represent themselves is education. However, the faultlines in the creation and production of knowledge that passes off as a uniform ‘national’ narrative create omissions and distorted representations of minorities. With a population of more than 4.9 million, Indian Americans comprise approximately 1.35% of the U.S. population. They are the largest group of South Asian Americans and the highest-earning ethnic group in the United States. The controversy over the content of history textbooks in California reveals the divisions over historical knowledge in the Indian diaspora between Hindu nationalist groups who are trying to speak up for the entire Indian community and the secular South Asian groups like South Asian Histories for All and academics focusing on South Asia. By analyzing the role of different stakeholders in these textbook controversies, this paper underlines the increasing role of Hindu nationalism in making epistemological claims over ancient Indian history, a key argument of this paper, and its effect in reconstructing the “Indian” identity in a diasporic setting.