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Controlling the Curricula: Textbook Regulation in India, 1870s – 2000s

Debarati Bagchi

Since the formation of the first Central textbook Committee in Bengal in 1875, various actors and institutions have debated the power of district and central committees in recognising and de-recognising school textbooks, ways of regulating the production of textbooks, and the share of responsibility between the state and private publishers. In post-independence India, the tussles over these questions of jurisdiction and control on textbook production and curriculum designing overlapped with the cultural tensions between the nation and the region, the centre and the states. Privatisation of education added new layers to the story. Also, textbook controversies became integral to the discourse on school pedagogy in post-independence India. Every time there was a change in the ruling government, textbooks—particularly social science and humanities textbooks—turned into battlegrounds of competing ideologies. This project wishes to situate these moments in the longer history of institutionalisation of curricula and textbooks in India, with a focus on colonial and post-independence Bengal. Archival research will be juxtaposed with an ethnography of textbook markets in West Bengal to understand the overlapping histories of state regulation and market control in the domain of pedagogy.