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The debate around the National Curriculum Framework 2000 mirrored the intense conflict between competing visions of nationhood and national identity that have dominated India’s public and political discourse over the last two decades. Not surprisingly, the authors of the new policy have justified their large-scale revisionism by invoking a particular conception of Indian nationalism, and how it must be communicated in school education, even if it implied the deletion of certain historical `facts’ and reinterpretation of certain historical ‘events’. Ironically, the question of gender, deeply implicated in the debate of nationalism, remained marginal to the NCF 2000 curriculum debate: there was little systematic effort to criticise the NCF from a gendered perspective, whether on the question of history, tradition or religious value education. It was clear to us in Nirantar that there was need to look at gender concerns in mainstream education in a manner that intersected with other concerns related to class, caste and religious identity, in addition to issues related to nation and national identity. It was also evident that women studies was particularly disengaged with children’s education and there was a need to bring it more proactively into the debate.
The year 2005 saw the drafting of the National Curriculum Framework 2005. Representatives from academia, the teaching community and NGOs were involved in writing focus group papers on 21 themes. These focus group papers contributed to the formulation of the NCF document. In addition to this, new syllabi based on the NCF 2005 and the first round of changes in textbooks formed part of the initiatives that mainstream education witnessed. Nirantar has been part of the Gender Focus Paper and in the formulation for the syllabi for political science and in the writing and designing of the textbooks. The Gender Focus paper provides a radical departure from how the education sector has looked at gender in education till now – not merely in terms of breaking stereotypes or in terms of quantitative representation, but into the domain of disciplinary knowledge. A substantive, rather than a merely formal inclusion of gender meant a change in the framework rather than the add-and-stir approach usually used with gender in textbooks.
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