Deconstructing History Texts: Addressing the Notions of Reality, Representation and Relevance in the Manipur State Textbooks

The book intends to look into the problems and issues in the curriculum. In our education system, the textbook is an important aspect through which the curriculum is selected and organized. It also plays the role of a powerful tool of socialization with its selection influenced by the socio-economic, political and cultural environment of the time. In such a scenario, it is important that we analyze and study the representation of the reality as given in the textbooks. This is done using the method of deconstruction, following a democratic approach to contest and question the incompleteness and omissions in the texts. History being a dynamic subject has varying interpretations and representations. It provides us with the platform to see whether the representation is complete and question the relevance of the texts with so many realities co-existing. The author tried to construct the reality with the help of secondary sources, and then compare the representation as given in the History textbooks. The attempt to understand the relevance of the textbooks was done by problematizing it and studying the social conditions on the basis of which the content is selected and organized.