ON A HOT MONDAY morning in April, a dozen of us were sitting in a classroom at Kolkata’s Institute of Development Studies, watching the pata artist and illustrator Siraj Chitrakar sketch on a blackboard. We were there to attend a workshop for the second instalment of the Itihase Hatekhari—First History Lessons—book series. Chitrakar was sharing an idea for a page layout. First published in 2022, the series consists of short, illustrated and easy-to-read history books for middle-school students. Written in Bengali, all three of the initial books were later translated into Assamese, by the writer Arup Kalita, and English, by the translator Arunava Sinha. The books’ authors and co-editors, Anwesha Sengupta and Debarati Bagchi, told me that the second leg of the series, scheduled to be released by September this year, would follow suit.
In 2019, when they first began discussing writing the books with their third collaborator, Tista Das, an assistant professor of history at Bankura University, the country was in a furore. Just months away from the paralysing effects of the pandemic, the nation’s streets were ablaze with protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which could, along with the National Register of Citizens, pave the way to religion-based access to citizenship and the disenfranchisement of Muslims.
The perils these schemes posed for India’s Muslims were repeatedly denied in and outside parliament. In speeches delivered during the Bhartiya Janata Party’s election campaign in West Bengal, however, the union home minister, Amit Shah, described the CAA and NRC as a two-pronged technique to “detect and deport every infiltrator from our motherland.” He also emphasised how poorly Hindu refugees were treated under the 1950 Liaquat-Nehru Pact. The CAA and NRC would right these “wrongs” of the Partition, he suggested repeatedly. Such ideas spread across WhatsApp networks run directly or indirectly by the BJP and its associates. Messages celebrated the CAA as a major step towards building a Hindu Rashtra and ridding India of Muslims. The justification for such actions drew from the BJP’s Hindutva ideology, premised on Hindu victimhood.
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