It's said that history is written by the winners. But it's also written -- and rewritten -- by textbook publishers. From Texas to Japan, textbooks have been the objects of heated controversy, with protesters often seeing nothing less than history at stake.

One recent clash occurred in California. The weekly newspaper India-West reports that South Asian groups there bumped heads with each other and religious scholars over the representation of Hindu culture and religion in the state's sixth-grade textbooks. Points of contention included the caste system, Aryan migration, and the treatment of women. As India-West reported in a piece picked up by the Pacific News Service in December, among the changes sought were replacing the sentence 'Men had many more rights than women,' with 'Men had different duties (dharma) as well as rights than women. Many women were among the sages to whom the Vedas were revealed.'

The suggested changes kicked up a storm of critics, including a band of prominent religious scholars led by Harvard Sanskrit professor Michael Witzel. In a letter to the California Board of Education (CBE), Witzel wrote, 'The proposed revisions are not of a scholarly but of a religious-political nature, and are primarily promoted by Hindutva [Hindu nationalism] supporters and non-specialist academics writing about issues far outside their area of expertise.' As proponents insisted the changes were necessary to correct 'biases and distortions,' the academics argued that they tended to cast a warm light on the colder aspects of Indian culture.