How NCERT's Class 8 Social Sciences Textbook Omits South India
Amol Saghar | 28 November 2025 | The Wire
From the moment one opens the newly-published Class 8 social-science textbook (Part 1) of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), titled Exploring Society: India and Beyond, a quietly alarming pattern emerges. In tone, in scope, and in what is insisted upon for retention, the textbook seeks to sketch history differently. But beneath the surface of this ‘new’ narrative lies an even more profound concern, namely, the systematic marginalisation of large swathes of India’s past, and in particular, the histories of South India. Dynasties, resistance movements and cultural contributions of South India are either squeezed into peripheral mention or entirely excluded.
Such exclusions, needless to say, have long term implications as far as historical education, regional identity and national memory, are concerned. Textbooks are far more than curriculum documents. They are cultural artefacts that shape how young people imagine the past, position themselves in the present, and project into the future. A student picking up an NCERT Class 8 book is not simply learning facts, he/she is internalizing the implied question — which stories of India’s past matter and which don’t? And when a considerable region, like South India in this case, finds its past under-represented or omitted, the consequences ripple widely…