CHANGING THE MEANING OF THE IMAGES IN THE HISTORY TEXTBOOK: AN INDICATION OF INTERNAL COLONIALISM

Abstract

The Indian history textbook for class eight published by the National Council for Educational Research and Training includes a plethora of images, and readers are encouraged to look at them critically. There is a clear effort to teach history through the visuals. This research is primarily concerned about the representation of the historical stories of the tribal people of India and thus it only closely analyzes the chapter four that is dedicated to the stories of the tribal people. Moreover, this paper critically examines three pictures of the tribal people of India, taken by an internationally recognized photo journalist Sunil Janah, that have been attached to the forth chapter of the book. This is an effort to show the contrast between the stories behind the pictures in their original context, with the new stories that the same pictures depict in a very different context in the textbook. The changed meaning of the pictures and the way they are used in the textbook shows an ignorance of telling the history of the tribal people in their own way. A closer look will reveal the dominance of highly colonized ideology that encourages the book writers to dehumanize a very diverse Indian tribal community and neglect their identity by putting them under one umbrella term. Also, the same ideology reflects when the book attempts to tell their stories in an apathetic and monotonous way