It looks like the Rajasthan government wants it students to
learn regional art as it has omitted poems by the likes of John Keats, Thomas
Hardy, William Blake, T S Eliot and Edward Lear from the revised Class VIII
English textbooks. In place of these, work by lesser-known authors who have a
regional flavor have been introduced.
Works like Hardy's 'When I Set Out For Lyonnesse', Eliot's 'Macavity: The Mystery Cat' and Blake's 'The School Boy' have been dropped, works such as 'My first visit to the bank', 'The Brave Lady of Rajasthan', 'Chittor', 'Sangita the brave girl' have been included in the first lot of revised textbooks that have arrived at state textbook depots in Ajmer, Udaipur, Dausa, Bharatpur and Jaipur.
The idea behind this move is to include content that evokes a sense of pride in the state and the country. Rajasthan had rewritten textbooks from Class I to XII last year. The books that have arrived include those for Class VIII (Hindi, English, Sanskrit, maths) and Class VI (English, Hindi, maths). They have been confined in the godowns of state textbooks depots.
Apart from regional additions, other work includes that of Swami Vivekananda's 'The song of the free' and Rabindranath Tagore's 'Where the mind is without fear'.
Not only this, Hindi textbook of class VIII has undergone a change as Urdu author Ismat Chugtai's short story 'Kamchor' and Hari Shankar Parsai's 'Bus Ki Yatra' have been omitted.
Another work that was dropped includes Veteran journalist P Sainath's 'Jaha Pahiya hai'(Where there is a wheel), which talks about bicycles becoming a symbol of women emancipation.
A member of the textbook committee stated that Hindi chapters that were dropped included those which had Urdu words and difficult for students to understand. Others dropped included based around a particular faith.
President of Swayamsevi Shikshan Sanstha, (a body of private schools affiliated to the Rajasthan Board of Secondary Board) Satyavrat Samvedi said that if all new books include the regional work then students would lag in national-level competitions.