Hindu American parents in California who feared that their children would continue to be exposed to embarrassing misconceptions about India and Hinduism in their classrooms won a partial victory Dec. 2 from the state’s Curriculum Commission, which agreed to make some corrections in the world history course in the proposed textbooks for sixth-graders in California schools.

In its ruling, the commissioners rebuffed many suggestions made to them last month by a group of history and Sanskrit scholars and other academics worldwide, including Michael Witzel, a Sanskrit professor at Harvard University who led the charge for making little or no changes in the textbooks, and UCLA history professor emeritus Stanley Wolpert (I-W, Dec. 2).

At the emotion-packed meeting here Dec. 1, during which the impassioned presentations of some 30 Hindus many of them parents of California students clearly rattled at least one of the 14 commissioners, dismayed some others and left a few others confused, speakers urged the commissioners to accept the corrections suggested by the ad hoc committee set up by the State Board of Education in October. The presenters were given no more than a minute each to make their case.

It was the testimony of the parents that most moved some of the commissioners.

Milpitas resident Madhulika Singh recalled how her 11-year-old son came back from school one day and announced he didn’t want to be called a Hindu any more, just American. He said he had been ridiculed in school that day by his classmates because of what they had been taught,” Singh told the commissioners. Some of the controversial content includes passages such as: ‘Evil deeds cause a person to be reborn as a lower being, such as insect’; ‘The monkey king Hanuman loved Rama so much that it is said that he is present every time the Ramayana is told. So look around, " see any monkeys?”’; and “If you had earned bad karma, you might come back as a chicken, a fish, or a pig.”

“This concerns kids,” asserted Fremont resident Anjali Patel, whose daughters are in the seventh and tenth grades. Patel is the California coordinator of the Hindu Education Foundation. “We want Hinduism to be accurately represented.” The corrections were recommended about a year ago by the San Francisco Bay Area-based Hindu Education Foundation and the Texas-based The Vedic Foundation when the State Board of Education began the review process of upcoming textbooks.

Among the ‘edits’ the two groups wanted were the letter ‘g’ be capitalized in the word, God, and to remove all negative portrayals of women.

They also asked that the sentence, ‘women enjoyed more rights than Women’, be changed to ‘women enjoyed different rights than women.’

The HEF wanted the definition of yoga to be changed from ‘a type of slow breathing’ to a set of exercises that helps to unite the different personality layers of a person.

The Vedic Foundation, which had put forth many suggestions independent of the Hindu Education Foundation, wanted that the word, ‘statue’ used when referring to the carved images of Gods or Goddesses, be replaced with the word, ‘deity’

The Vedic Foundation also wanted the term, ‘God-realization’, to replace the word, ‘enlightenment’, because, as its spokeswoman Janeswari Devi, explained, enlightenment is the word Buddhists use. Both groups wanted the Aryan invasion theory be removed from the textbooks, citing recent research that suggests that such an invasion never occurred.

In October, the State Board of Education seemed willing to accept the ‘edits’ suggested by the ad hoc committee, which comprised three Curriculum Commission members and three ‘experts’ representing three different religions. Dr. Shiva Bajpai, a well- known historian of 48 years who had taught at California State University in Northridge, Calif. for more than 30 years, was the Hindu expert on the committee.

Bajpai was hired on the suggestion of the Hindu Education Foundation. He was asked to see if those 170 or so ‘edits’ HEF and The Vedic Foundation suggested were warranted. He told India- West he had approved almost 85 percent of the suggested corrections. Bajpai said that on Oct. 31, ‘the ad hoc committee had virtually adopted all I had validated, except the changes to the Aryan invasion theory, even though I told them it was no longer valid’, Bajpai said. But on Nov. 9, the State Board of Education received a petition from Witzel, co-signed by nearly 50 historians and academics worldwide, including Wolpert and Romila Thapar, arguably Indias most famous historian of ancient India.

CDE’s Curriculum Frameworks and Instructional Resources director Dr. Thomas Adams told India-West that the academics had not been invited by the State Board of Education to weigh in with their views, but they did it of their own accord when word got around that the SBE was reviewing the new textbooks publishers had brought in for approval. In it, Witzel told the SBE that the proposed changes are of a ‘religious political nature’ and are promoted by Hindutva supporters.

Saying that textbooks with changes similar to those proposed by the HEF had been ‘soundly repudiated in the last two years by Indian Educators’ themselves, Witzel warned of ‘an immediate international scandal if the California State Board of Education were to unwittingly endorse religious-nationalistic views of Indian history from which India has only extricated itself in the last two years.’

Because of that petition, in November, the California Commission on Education cobbled together a ‘content review panel’ comprising of Witzel, Wolpert, Dr. James Heitzman, director of summer sessions at UC Davis; and three Curriculum Commissioners to review the changes suggested by the ad-hoc panel.

Heitzman was present at last week at the Curriculum Commission meeting, serving as its resource person. Bajpai told India-West that Adams had not responded to his suggestion that he be invited to be present at the meeting as well. Of the 58 suggestions made by the Witzel panel, only around 10 were finally voted in by the Curriculum Commission Dec. 2. Three of the commissioners, Dr. Metzenberg, Dr. Sandra Mann and Dr. Deborah Keys more than once noted that they preferred to err on the side of those practicing the religion.

San Jose parent Govinda Yelagalawadi said his daughter’s sixth- grade textbook simply referred to the bindi " the dot worn on the forehead by women and some men, as well, to stimulate the ‘third eye’ simply as ‘a mark’. Parent Gaurang Desai of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh said he believed that asking the Witzel panel for suggestions was ‘like asking Hitler to write the history of the Jews in Europe’.

A representative of the Gujarat Samaj of Sacramento questioned why the comments of ‘those who are not practicing Hindus are taken more seriously than those practicing it.’ He was referring to the all-white Witzel group on the CRP. Nalini Rao, professor of world art at UCLA, said by ‘holding on to old opinions, ‘intellectual integrity’ of members of the Witzel panel came into question. More than one presenter expressed rage over the Witzel panel’s cavalier dismissal of the question on whether the Ramayana was written before the Mahabharata. The books are considered two of the greatest epics of India. In his comments to the State Board of Education, Witzel had written: ‘Who in sixth grade cares which epic was written first?’ Whether or not to include the long-disputed Aryan invasion theory in the textbooks generated a lengthy and sometimes contentious debate. But in the end, the commissioners declined to accept the claims by the Hindu organizations and other academics to reject the theory propounded by the 19th century German philologist, orientalist and Sanskrit scholar, Max Muller. Witzel’s panel had strenuously supported Muller’s theory.

They, however, agreed to replace the word, ‘invasion’, in the textbooks with the word, ‘migration’, and even went so far as to say they would prefix mention of the Aryan invasion theory with the words, ‘some historians believe’. But this agreement was reached only after Commissioner Stan Metzenberg, an assistant professor of biology at Cal State Northridge, said the little bit of research he did on the Aryan invasion theory before the Dec. 1 meeting indicated there was ‘no DNA evidence to support it.’ “’I believe the hard DNA evidence more than I do the historians,’ Metzenberg asserted.

But Commissioner Charles Munger, Jr., a physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, heatedly pointed out that to this day ‘there is a legal disagreement in academic circles on whether or not the Aryan invasion occurred’; that it was still an open-ended question. He said that even though Bajpai had said ‘it was not very respectable’ to accept the Aryan invasion theory, his own review of a number of books on the subject indicated that there was enough linguistic, scriptural and anthropological evidence to show that the Witzel panel was right in asking that it remain in the books.

‘How can these people challenge the judgment of 50 scholars who have devoted a lifetime of study to the subject?’ Wolpert told India-West, when called to comment on the Curriculum Commission’s decisions. Witzel has a sharp understanding and broad range of knowledge about India’.

But Bajpai dismissed that assertion as baseless. ‘At least since 1932, historians and academics and specialists of history and culture have been challenging the Aryan invasion theory.’ Bajpai told India-West by telephone from his Southern California home. ‘Experts are now saying that based on historical facts, the Aryans were an indigenous people, same as the people of the Harappan culture.’

Nearly 30 organizations in California, including the Santa Clara County Office of Education, Berryessa Union School District, Sunnyvale School District, Vedanta Society of Sacramento and Badrikashrama had given written support to the Hindu Americans.

Congresswoman Linda T. Sanchez of the 39th district of California (at the request of Kevin Kaul) wrote to Jack O’ Connell, state superintendent of Public Instruction and Director of Education, urging that Witzel's accusations that the Hindu groups are biased be investigated before a vote was taken.

The Curriculum Commission's decisions will now go before the State Board of Education, which must make the final decision. There are around 500,000 sixth-graders in California schools, making California the largest purchaser of textbooks. Every six years, publishers turn in new textbooks to the State Board of Education for approval.