Gujarat's Class XII textbook says Rama abducted Sita

Ahmedabad: Who abducted Sita? Even a kid next door would rattle off the correct answer. But Class XII Sanskrit textbook of the Gujarat board has got this most basic fact from ‘Ramayana’ wrong as it claims it was Lord Rama, not Ravana, who was the abductor!

“Here the poet has brought out a beautiful picture of the character of Rama with his original thought and thinking. There is very heart-touching description of the message conveyed by Laxman to Ram when Sita was abducted by Rama (sic),” reads a para on page number 106 of ‘Introduction to Sanskrit Literature’, which is replete with spelling errors right from the word go.

Only English medium students are subjected to the glaring blooper as the Gujarati textbook has got this fact right in the paragraph on ‘Raghuvansham’, an epic by Sanskrit poet Kalidas.


Retired Sanskrit professor Vasant Bhatt says it is known to all that Ravana abducted Sita and that Raghuvansham too depicts the same. When contacted, Dr Nitin Pethani, executive president of Gujarat State Board of School Textbooks Gandhinagar, first said that he was not aware of the blooper but later admitted the mistake. “It is a translation error where Ravana is replaced with Rama. In Gujarati textbook, there is no mistake,” Pethani said.

In 2014, TOI had launched the campaign ‘Error Terror' which covered textbooks of standards 6-8 and pointed out glaring errors, like ‘Japan dropped the nuclear bomb on America’ and ‘Qutub Minar is a city’.

As a result of the campaign, the Gujarat government had suspended three panelists and sacked six translators while withholding their remuneration of Rs 3 lakh each. The GCERT was directed to immediately correct the errors, which led to three reviewed and corrected versions of the textbooks for classes 6 to 8.