In Quest of Togetherness: ‘Sangati’

The Detective and the Historian

Imagine that you are a detective. You will probably relate the nature of your work to solving jigsaw puzzles. As a detective, you will be required to put together the missing pieces and arrive at a plausible explanation of the situation/event you are examining. This explanation that you arrive at will be a theory that you will formulate, which, according to you, will be the most convincing explanation of the situation under examination. The strength of the theory you formulate will depend on the strength of the evidence that you have in support of your theory.

Now, imagine you are a historian. What kind of work do you think you will be required to do as a historian? Do you think it will have any similarity to the work of a detective as described above? Does the possibility sound too far-fetched to you? If you will pause and reflect for a while, you will realize how similar both tasks are.

A historian is also a person who pieces together parts of a jigsaw puzzle and tries to make sense out of these. Out of the various pieces of evidence available to her, in the form of artefacts, archaeological remains, written and oral narratives, paintings, coins, and so on and so forth, a historian tries to place these in context, weighs them for their authenticity, relates them to other existing pieces of evidence and narratives, and then tries to formulate a narrative or a theory based on these, which, to her, sounds the best explanation for the situation under examination.

Again, the strength of the theory formulated depends on the strength of the evidence provided. A historian, thus, also understands that a theory that she is putting forward is not sacrosanct but is falsifiable, and thus liable to be modified or discarded in the wake of stronger counter evidence emerging. Also, since it is a theory based on her interpretation of the evidence in front of her, the historian also realizes that there may be equally plausible alternate explanations or interpretations of the same evidence, which may lead to other theories.

So, essentially the process of rewriting and reinterpreting lies at the heart of the historical process. However, this reinterpretation needs to conform to the standards of scientific enquiry.

The strength or weakness of all such theories depends on the strength or weakness of the evidence the respective theories are based on and the interpretations provided. Thus, by virtue of the very process involved in the construction and reconstruction of History, there is bound to be a possibility of the existence of multiple histories.

History as ‘Detecting’ the Past: Learning through the Sangati Curriculum

All of us have studied History as a subject throughout our student lives. How many of us have been encouraged to visualize it in the manner above? I am sure many of us haven’t. The above visualization is something that is provided by the Avehi Abacus Project (AA) launched in 1990, through one of its programs titled ‘Sangati’.

The above analogy (between the work of a detective and a historian) is drawn in the third kit of the Sangati program, titled ‘How Societies Developed’. Sangati is a threeyear supplementary program that is being transacted with students of classes V to VII in the municipal schools of Mumbai by their regular school teachers. It comprises of six kits which are transacted mostly once a week, with a variety of pedagogic strategies. These involve the use of group-activities, surveys and data-analysis, self-reflection, art-craft, drawing upon knowledge outside the school, and visual material that is attractive, eclectic and interactive.

The vision underlying the program can be summed-up as follows. Learning according to AA:

• is best conceived as a process, not in terms of outcomes;
• is a continuous process, grounded in experience;
• is a holistic process of adaptation to the world;
• involves an understanding of the give and-take between the person and the environment;
• implies knowledge acquired as a result of the interaction between social and personal experience; therefore, underlying all this are value systems.

– (AA website, 2001).

The six interlinked themes flow logically and seamlessly into each other. The journey starts with understanding oneself, one’s body and the needs that all human beings possess. While the needs are common to all, they are met in diverse manner, and not provided for equally to all.

All these needs are met by resources provided by the earth. The second kit then moves on to ‘Our earth and the web of life’ that we are a part of. The attempt here is to understand our place in the universe and how complex and prolonged the process of evolution of life on earth has been. It is hoped these inputs will form the basis of creating feelings of humility towards nature.

The third kit then moves on to ‘How societies developed’ over time, across the world.

This kit encapsulates the history of human civilizations from early times to the 1950s. The focus is on phenomena, structures and processes, rather than on isolated events or characters. History is looked at as a collective heritage and is constantly connected with the present. Historical events are located in the context of the geographies they are enfolded in, adding more layers to understanding why they happened, and how the conditions prevalent in the space influenced them.

The fourth kit focusses on our society and ‘The way we live’ in the present, discussing various issues such as caste, religion and gender discrimination, and understanding our conceptions about patriotism, democracy, and the influence of media etc.

As change is a constant and continuous phenomenon, the next kit then focusses on ‘Understanding change’, and analysing it better, so that we can ‘create the society we want’ by developing a discerning mindset about the prevalent development paradigm to differentiate between ‘change and progress’.

the Sangati curriculum… does not limit History to dates and times, to kings and the boundaries of their empires, or does not try to colour it one way or the other.

The curriculum ends with a forward-looking note and helps understand how to ‘Prepare for the future’, as an individual and as a society. The entire curriculum is designed to be interactive and joyful, to replace “teaching’ by a voyage of exploration to discover facets of ourselves, our society and the world, to accommodate the understanding that each child thinks and learns differently, to encourage students to express their thoughts and share their life experiences, to help them cope with different situations and make the right choices, and determine better futures for themselves and those around them” (AA, Dear Teacher…, 2001).

Crossing Boundaries of Learning

Although, the Sangati curriculum is not discipline-based and restricted to subject-boundaries, yet just for the sake of comparison, Kit III, titled ‘How societies developed’, can be related to History.

However, it has a very different take on how and why students need to be made aware of ‘History’. First and foremost, it does not talk about one single ‘History’, but of multiple histories, of kings as of common people, of wars as of their futility, of pathbreaking events as of their impact –positive or negative depending on social locations of different sub-groups, in India and the world.

It does not limit History to dates and times, to kings and the boundaries of their empires, or does not try to colour it one way or the other. Instead, it encourages students to live it, to explore and to discover it, to go through the excitement of finding the pieces of jigsaw puzzle and trying to put them together in a way they think is most plausible.

It, then, does-not discredit one arrangement of jigsaw puzzle in favour of the other, instead it gives the message that many different arrangements are possible, and all will equally have to stand the test of falsifiability. It titillates and challenges the minds of the students, encouraging them to play with ideas and look at things holistically.

Avehi Curriculum Vs Textbook History

History, in the school textbooks in Maharashtra, is generally presented as a finished product that must be accepted as it is. This is completely in contrast to the alternate vision of Avehi Abacus, where it is treated as a process and a journey of exploration, waiting to be undertaken by young and curious minds. One views ‘History’ as a dynamic living process, the other as a static end-product that is too fragile to be tampered with in any manner and must be taken in the form it is presented, no questions asked.

In the context of attempts to rewrite history, Neeladri Bhattacharya states, “The past does-not come to us with a unitary truth embedded within it; the facts that historians mine do not ever speak with one single voice. As our perspectives change, we look at the past in new ways, reinterpret events, discover new meanings within them, pose new questions that could not even be formulated within the limits of earlier frameworks of analysis. So historians tell different stories of the same past, refigure evidence in diverse ways in the act of rewriting history – an act that enriches the conceptions of our past.” (Bhattacharya, 2002).

So, essentially the process of rewriting and reinterpreting lies at the heart of the historical process. However, this reinterpretation needs to conform to the standards of scientific enquiry. It needs to be based on legitimate evidence. It needs to put those evidence out in the open for scrutiny and examination. The theories that are put forward need to be falsifiable. Each and every statement that is made needs to be supported by some evidence and also has to be open to challenge in the face of a counter-evidence.

We also need to realize and acknowledge the efforts of those who have been trying to put forward counter narratives, challenging and questioning the above process of fabricating history and providing an alternative vision, that is based on the principles of enquiry rather than a final word that is considered to be sacrosanct. In such a vision, the values of today are tested on the anvil of the past values and vice versa, making them the stuff of real life and not as the deified glorious past or a binary of good vs evil. Avehi Abacus Project and ‘Sangati’ are the living embodiments of such a vision.