The famous poem “Khoob ladi mardani woh toh…”, describing Rani Laxmibai’s valour, has also immortalised the Scindias’ friendship with the British in a line that is still invoked to embarrass the ancestors of the erstwhile rulers of Gwalior. The line “…angrezon ke mitra Scindia ne chhodi rajdhani thi…” has now gone missing from Subhadra Kumari Chouhan’s poem in the new Hindi textbook of Class VI, an omission that has taken everybody by surprise because no one seems to have authorised it. The State Education Centre (SEC), the Standing Committee on Textbooks and the Textbook Corporation passed the buck to each other.
The Standing Committee, which finalises the school syllabus, called it a criminal act. “You can either take a poem or omit it but you can’t tamper with it,” said Govind Sharma, the committee’s chairman. He said he found a bunch of lines missing in the latest version. “I never authorised it,” he said, seeking a probe into the “deliberate act”.