May 25, 2016, "Viewpoint: Why Hindu groups are against California textbook change," BBC, Rohit Chopra, Assoc. Prof. of media studies at Santa Clara Univ.
"Thousands of academics and Indians
have signed a petition to stop the California State Board of Education
from changing "India" to "South Asia" in its social studies textbooks....
The debate centres significantly on the renaming of India as South Asia and the role of caste in Indian society.
The rationale for calling the region South Asia, advocated by a group of distinguished academics, is that it is a more accurate descriptive term for the region, one that does not equate India as it existed before 1947 with the modern Indian nation-state.
Terms like "ancient India" and India, they argue, could be confusing in certain contexts for the students, in addition to obscuring the common historical past of modern India and Pakistan respectively....
The Hindu-American organisations accuse the academics of wanting to "erase" India itself by recommending the change of name. These groups also seek to remove references to caste prejudice in the textbooks.
The academics, on the other hand, argue that South Asia is a more logically appropriate term than India for the textbooks. They also hold that deleting references to caste contradicts the educational goal that students should develop a rich and nuanced understanding of the region."...
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