The blinds are drawn. The film is judiciously chosen. It received an Oscar for editing. So when the journalist announces at Gandhi’s cremation what a man he was, we already see the train hurtling through the night fifty years ago, telling us he was not always such a man. He learnt, he grew, he evolved.

The eleven are silent, but there is a sound of assent. The eleven are still, but there is a movement of response. We put on lights, they have questions to discuss.

Question one: What was Gandhi’s regional, ethnic, class background? Ten suburban houses (one is from crowded Singapore, a flat no doubt). Ten suburban houses with ten crowded rooms in which furniture lives. The people come and go opening fridges talking on phones shutting bedroom doors shutting bathroom doors doing laundry mowing lawns taking out garbage backing out cars it doesn’t matter the region the religion the background.

Gandhi’s house was large too, crowded too, with people, a three storeyed house with a courtyard and many brothers and their families, as in Pamuk’s Istanbul, and a swirl of activity everywhere but also retreats for the children to hide, talk and fight in. Few doors, little furniture, many sounds. Vaishnava means tuneful music, baniya means frugal living, plates of fresh vegetarian food and an autocrat father. No hugging between family members.

Question two: What did Gandhi learn from his parents? Ten little children (I really can’t say about my student from Singapore) buckled up in car seats swinging their legs from shopping carts going off to baby sitters starting kindergarten having birthdays separate rooms activities friends foods more and more a sense of the separate self as Mr Rogers says you are special there is no one in the world like you Yes, and a lot of macaroni pizza juice milk ice cream snot doctors jackets sneakers hair dirt baths water electricity garbage garbage garbage. You learn that you can create as much garbage as you like because you can throw away as much as you like because you can buy anything you like.

Gandhi watched his mother pray and fast, fast and pray. He saw his father as the essence of decorum, truth, determination. His mother said no! and it was no. His father said yes! And it was yes. The children did not know what the two discussed among themselves. Or what they called each other. Or whether they loved each other. Two separate worlds, mother and father. No closed doors. But complete privacy. Complete security. My parents are with me now and always. My family my community is with me. All people are with me. I belong to all and all to me. No one could turn me away. My world is full of people not objects.

Question three: What did Gandhi learn in school and college? Eleven colourful backpacks eleven lunch boxes parents’ teachers’ meetings lovely libraries children’s books more books listen to stories do worksheets colour pin up cut and paste build playtime quiet time outdoors indoors. College courses serious serious serious my course my schedule my college my career soon my life my country but I cannot pronounce Gandy or spell his name Ghandi let me learn oh Gandhi.

Gandhi went to a little colonial school then a bigger colonial school then to London. He learnt facts facts facts. But he also learnt English. He learnt manners. He learnt law. He learnt parliamentary procedure. He learnt that English language, people, law, processes were good, serious but also funny. He was totally persuaded. Then he said, uh-oh, I got thrown out of a train in British territory for being ‘coloured.’ I’m coloured? Like those shabby morose people who have nothing? Uh-oh. I will polish up my Gujarati. I will learn some Hinduism. I will read the Ramayana and Gita. I will find a book on Indian History. School was good of course. London was great. My countrymen to come don’t need them, however. They need to be sure that they don’t get thrown off trains for being coloured.

Question four: What was the main problem for Gandhi? Eleven thoughtful creaseless brows. What is a problem? Waking up in the morning which breakfast cereal which bagel or muffin wheat or rye scrambled or fried cream cheese or jelly orange or apple tea or coffee? How to reach class print out paper plan for exam grab lunch pizza or burger salad or soup ham or beef mustard or mayo dessert or not oops buy a drink forgot my ipod wheres my cell phone call her him them the problem is I can do it all but am not sure what I am doing. I am good but good for what?

Gandhi was depressed. People were mean, stupid, prejudiced, lazy, lying, cheating, non co-operative. They had forgotten that they were part of godhood, that they had god inside them. Gandhi was excited. They could be anything they wanted they could have peace they could love be happy be free.

Question five: What was Gandhi’s solution?  No answers? Let me give. Don’t be coercive. Use strong persuasion. Er—that’s coercive. Don’t be violent. Change people from the inside. Um—that could be violent.

 

 

Yesterday I had a different experience in Los Angeles. I was transported back some forty years.

In 1972 when I first came to the USA, I got to know people like Gay and Eileen Haas. Yesterday I got to know Barney Salzburg and Susan Strick, who reminded me of Gay and Eileen. Let me remember the past, which is such a lovely, luxurious thing to do.

I had just arrived in the USA, not yet 21 years old. Gay and Eileen lived in a beautiful red wooden house with a rambling garden and driveway in front. The address was magical, “121 Old Post Road, Fairfield, Connecticut.” Both taught English, so of course their house was laden with books. The living room had a fireplace that was used and had ash-touched tools for fire-making in front. A guitar hung on the wall, a fiery orange rug, miscellaneous pieces of art. There was a sofa, an inclined leather chair with matching footstool and assorted comfortable chairs. The wall to wall rug was meant to be sat on wherever one pleased.

It was not the furniture that swept me away, but the furnishings of the mind, so to speak. From the beginning, discussions were intense in this place. The world was our oyster. We would cook a nice dinner, say, dahi ka gosht and bhindi, and pour ourselves drinks meanwhile, with cheese and crackers set out. The food had a history, a sociology, and a politics. So did everything else. Everyone had something to say, and something to respond, on seemingly every subject.

Conversation does not ever stop. There is each one’s family, and extended family. There are the cities one has lived in and come from. There are the experiences of buying, travelling, studying, making friends and enemies. Life is a museum to be closely inspected and wondered at. No, it is a seminar hall with panel after panel of chosen issues to be thrashed out. No, it is an art gallery where anything may be presented because it is the artist’s point of view. Or is it a restaurant where the talented cooks—us—are producing marvellous concoctions from an elaborate menu that will not soon be exhausted.

 It was, in fact, merely Gay and Eileen’s living room, where I came again and again, and in the course of our intense conversations, discovered myself and what I meant to think, that is, what I believed, about different things. Or maybe I constructed myself there.

That was the beauty of America for me, this life of the mind, lived in the beauty of an artistic dwelling. As I got to know them better, I knew their blueberry bush in the backyard, their interesting garage, their den with the piano, the dining room and the cats, the kitchen with the windows behind the counters (the counters for more leaning on, the windows for thoughtfully looking out as more issues were dissected), the bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs, the attic with storage, the cellar with a ping-pong table and laundry stuff.

When you are young and wondering what your own dwelling might be like in the future, this all seems like a dream. Intimate, totally manageable, with the magical quality of a book, and with the ultimate achievement of transferring the mundane to the level of the intellectual.

So, yesterday, I could re-live that old magic. Barney and Susan’s house was not New England, but Spanish, style. The backyard had gravel and cactus. But inside there was the entrance that had little pieces of art and guided you into another world. The living room had beautiful wood furniture, many comfortable chairs and sofas, and objects that had meaning, each, to the inhabitants, so could be pondered over by the friends.

Then there was the corridor with lovely photographs of the family. Off it were the bedrooms, master, son’s, daughter’s. Each had a high bed slathered with cushions, with a dinky little bedside table, or two, a thick chest of drawers, old-style closets and heavy windows. The wallpaper and curtains were  very interesting and very fine.

Then we come to the hub of the house, the kitchen. Every gadget is visible, but well used. There is much evidence of cooking from scratch, and of pleasure taken in raw and natural things. There is a squash sitting on the window will, and garlic and onions, and mandarin oranges, and varieties of chopping boards and knives. Pots and pans are either hung up or I imagine it and they could have been, as I have also possibly imagined the squash and the garlic. The counter space is luxurious. On one side is a generous table with mismatched chairs. Over it hang paper dolls that are exotic enough to be voodoo.

In the beautiful houses like this, the possessions are accumulated over the years, when they are not inherited. Rarely do they have the matched and pre-put together look of “sets” of things that you buy ready from stores. Never are the items light, or hollow, or cheap.

Barney is, of course, an artist, and Susan a lawyer. They do not have the literary magazines strewn around like Gay and Eileen, nor did we talk about authors, ideas, and politics. Barney’s original art work, and that of fellow artists, was delicately framed and displayed. We talked a bit about their work, their family, and their city. If we were to meet repeatedly, we would definitely talk about issues.

But yesterdayI did not talk at all. I was transported to the past and was swimming in the sheer beauty of it all. When the texture, and form of things meets the thick, but many-layered, stringy, strandy inside of things, and there is dissection but also just spontaneous exchange. There is pleasure, and excitement, and laughter. There is the promise of the whole iceberg under the surface. There is–a  beautiful house and a kitchen much used.

Fine the machine must have ground because the first proper school I went to was St Mary’s Academy, Meerut. I was seven and I was admitted to class 3 in the middle of the year. That this was on my mother’s insistence I know because the class teacher looked on me sceptically for weeks and even smiled sarcastically. Like home-schooled children, there were many things I did not know, subjects I had never encountered, and interpersonal etiquette I was unfamiliar with. And of course I was too young for the class and so habituated to a solitary existence that I was struck dumb at being there. My mother continued to work with me at home in a parallel school. She went over everything that was taught and made sure I had it down pat. She wrote out the questions and answers that were my homework and I copied them conscientiously. Then she made me memorise them for good measure.

It worked perfectly. I stood first in class. I became the darling of teachers. I got a double promotion. I never saw the face of class 4 and went straight to class 5 at the tender age of eight. The only thing I remember about those earliest two years is the feel of books and copies, the sweet touch of well kept paper, my attaché case, my desk in school, my exams returned with full marks, my ready response to questions no one else could get, and the feeling of well being all this produced.

By the end of class 5 I had become hooked to topping and success. That this was my mother’s project was evidenced by the note for posterity left by my teacher in my class 3 marksheet, “Congratulations! Nita has come first—just as you said!”

Meerut was an education, too. It had a Nauchandi fair that seemed wild and exciting. It had other officers’ children to occasionally play with. We had two Alsatians, Blackie and Kitty, who could be made to race madly in the back lawn. We had a cook and personal servant called Shankar. He introduced subtle traces of “the real India” into my life. I credit him with the formation of the anthropologist in me. He told me about his village, about fairies and witches, and about some of the people in the city. I learnt to bicycle and he accompanied me to school every day, I on my blue bicycle, he on his. I was considered small enough that he was in charge of my bathing and changing, getting into bed, and of course, all my meals. I had a brother who was the cutest possible infant. My brother taught me to be an older sister and to love mothering and babying.

On my birthday—it must have been my seventh—I got a book that became the first book I personally  owned. I mean a sizeable book. It was hard cover and was called Girls’ Library or something. It was a typical volume of the fifties for English schoolgirls. I turned the pages over again and again, looking hard at all the pictures. It was too difficult for me, but I waited, and at some point I could read it. I became the sweet girls in nicely billowing frocks walking on heaths and cliffs. All their adventures were mine.

Class 6 and part of 7 were very different because, as part of the risk his job entailed, my father was posted to a backwater called Sitapur that had, apparently, no school of the calibre I could study in. So I was kept with my grandparents in Allahabad, the seat of modern schooling. My grandfather was a District Judge. My grandmother was an artist and matriarch. My uncle, my mother’s brother, was twelve years older than me, studying engineering.

Another bungalow, this one even vaster. The dog stayed outside, and there was a cow. I never got to know the servants. No visiting friends and not a single friend ever came over. Occasionally a trip to the river to swim. An occasional badminton game with my uncle. Otherwise afternoons and evenings of sitting curled up in my room reading the Children’s Encyclopaedia from cover to cover.

That was my real education. The Children’s Encyclopaedia was addressed to two English children my age, John and Jane. They learnt History and Geography, Science and Music, and got to do a crafts project every week, and French with their mother. The boundaries between my real life and the life I lived through this set of books got blurred. I forgot the girls in billowing frocks who walked on heaths and moors, and became John and Jane, who sat primly at a little desk on little chairs and listened to their mother with her narrow waist in a straight dress.

I spent a fair amount of my time with my grandmother. She had a rash that had to be painted over and I got the job of brushing on the paint once a day on the back of her neck. She had a complicated puja that I regarded warily. It had those biscuit and toffee tins from England whose recycling proved the end of an era. Nani was too authoritarian for me. I fell in love with my faraway mother as I might not  had I lived with her.

As for my grandfather, Nana was a dictator. He played several roles, all very seriously. He sat in his courtroom chair with a wig on. At home he wore a dhoti and kurta, awoke at 4 am to meditate, and ate things out of bowls. They were both strict vegetarians and the food was delicious. The cow mooed. We had our fill of dahi and panir and khir and ice cream. I itched to do things, I did not know what.

My father got transferred to Agra and I got to go home. Agra had a St Patrick’s for me and a St Anthony’s for my brother. They were real missionary institutions, just like Allahabad’s St Mary’s. Thank God, I would say with my hindsight. If I had gone to imitation convent schools, I would be a different person. If my father had continued in university teaching and not joined the government, my fate might have been that. Government service, convent schools, real education, all came together. Family separation, loneliness—that was only a small sacrifice on the way.

There are many beginnings.

The East India Company, the Crown and Parliament, the English language, the Indian Civil Services, the Catholic nuns, these are all beginnings.

My father, born in 1924, went first to a madrasa and learnt Urdu, Arabic and Persian. His four  brothers did the same, except perhaps the youngest, born in 1938, because things were already changing by then. His five sisters did not; girls did not go to madrasas. There were teachers and governesses who came to the house to teach all the children. After the madrasa, my father went to Lucknow Christian College. One of the original missionary schools in Uttar Pradesh, Christian College made him interested in the humanities. Like many others, he fell in love with English Literature. He did his B.A., and then M.A, in Literature from Lucknow University. He wanted to become a poet and an author. He had a terrific library of everyone who was anyone in English Literature. Sometime in the sixties or seventies, when government policy took a certain direction, he learnt to read and write Hindi. But just for the purpose of official letters and documents. He never read a word of Hindi for pleasure. From as soon as I was conscious, the delicious dust from all those books, Steele, Addison, Spencer, Marlowe, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantics, the Victorians, the Moderns, hundreds of books of poetry, essays, fiction, drama, criticism, went into my nose.

My mother, born in 1931, was educated carelessly, as was the wont for girls. She spent a large part of her childhood, together with cousins, at her grandparents’. Her grandfather was an advocate, an aristocrat, and an anglophile. He brought up his grandchildren in English style, even taking them to England to study for a year. Only when she came back to her own parents, did my mother go to regular school. But not for long. She was set up to be married by the time she was sixteen. Having done High School privately at twelve or thirteen, she was hurried up now to graduate. The subjects chosen for her were those that would supposedly be easy to study and also aid her as a home-maker: sitar, Sanskrit, and Home Science. She also studied violin and dance at the Bhatkhande School (now University) but again, briefly and carelessly. She was not careless; her parents were.

Careers, in those days, were seen strictly pragmatically. They were what gave you the wherewithal to live as you liked to and do what you enjoyed, and bring up our children in the ways you preferred and attain the status you were interested in. That a career fulfilled your curiousity or passion, involved you in a certain subject area or made you excel because of an innate talent—these were thoughts so foreign to everyone that they had never been thought.

My father, it may be said, spent the rest of his life floating on the nice cloud of literature and language provided by his education. He joined the Indian Police Service and shone. My mother shone, likewise, as the most gracious hostess, officer’s wife and social service volunteer.  That she continued to always feel less educated than she would like, no one could have guessed.  She did one course after the other, learning any number of things, but this only seemed wonderful. Her private awareness that she did not have an academic base stayed totally private.

All the childhood photographs I have seen show how proud they were to have me. When parents are proud, their happiness is tinged with worry. They want to give the best education to their children. But how are they to do that? My father, forced to abandon his literary dreams and join the Indian Police Service, was posted in the first seven years of my life in backwaters with no modern school. I have vague memories of village-like schools. I have strong memories of my mother teaching me at home.

We lived in bungalows. Bungalows are a shady nest of rooms, deeply recessed by verandas all around. They have screen doors that close by themselves on springs after they are opened. They have high echoing ceilings. The screens and the verandas make you feel, when inside, that you are separated from the world. You are definitely separated, because a bungalow is like an oasis, or an island. All around it is a compound. The compound has a garden on one side, maybe vegetables on another side, even grains in some bungalows, fruit trees, and some decorative things like rockeries and pathways, ponds and statues, that no one uses but that express the creative energies of memsahibs.

The layout of the rooms is always similar: a hallway, anteroom, or veranda set up with seating for visitors; a drawing room; a dining room; three or four bedrooms with attached dressing rooms and bathrooms, the dressing rooms large enough to be convertible to additional bedrooms; the kitchen outside; large, old-fashioned bathrooms. Every mistress uses the verandas and the gardens differently. But the rooms cannot be used in too many different ways. They are cavernous compared to an average family’s possessions. They have wide pathways and big spaces for children to career about in.

Maybe Indian leaders, on achieving Independence in 1947, should have dismantled the administrative services in its fundamental possession of privilege, embodied in the bungalow with all its rituals. I used to think that the bungalow and its lifestyle reproduced elitism in the children of the administrators, and was a direct cause of India’s backwardness.

Then I looked closely at my own case. Yes, the bungalow produced in me specific habits and traits. It made me lonely and dependant on my own resources. It spoilt me because I never had to lift a finger. It made me take servants and luxury for granted. Driven around, waited on, separated and shielded, it  gave me an unvoiced sense of power. Subconscously, I knew that a bungalow-dweller was special.

But we were not rich. I did not own many toys, or anything else. When I escaped my mother’s tutoring or was not attended to, I played outdoors with leaves and stones, balls and dogs. For company I had servants and servants’ children. When I had emotional or psychological needs, there they were and no wizard appeared to make them go away. I often felt deprived, since many of my school friends had nicer clothes or more treats than I. I often longed for movies or ice cream or visits to friends’ homes and was on principle refused these by my parents. Study, study, study, was my lot, and then in my free time, learn music and dance; read and write whatever I liked; play with the dogs or my brother or the compound children; go swimming in the club or horse riding; and walk around kicking stones or observe the servants in their manifold tasks.

I am not sure the bungalow made me so very privileged. And ‘Indian’? My parents were as Indian as anyone could be. We spoke Hindi, ate Indian food, albeit always with a pudding to end it, celebrated the festivals, went to a Hanuman temple on Tuesdays, and had nothing to do with any other country, including England. The attachments of older Indian educated people to England had taken the form of old biscuit and chocolate tins now used in the puja or pantry. They had some memories of their travels to England, but not very live or meaningful ones. They relished the anecdotes about their own grandparents, but as a time gone by, to be smiled at and not to be re-created.

On the whole, I was only a little bit the product of my bungalow childhood, and only a little bit of the small town schools I started life in. Mostly I was the product of my mother’s teaching.

Here is what I remember and what I know:

I would have a desk and chair, a copy book and a pencil. I would write and practice, and repeat and learn. We went on and on and on, with what I cannot say. Except that it was only words and numbers, nary a project or an activity. Every now and then I would revolt and we would have a tiff, my mother and I. She would say, “Then go and play!” and stalk off. I would breathe the air of liberation and start collecting my playing things. Before I had barely got past stage one, she would re-appear and say, “Come on, you errant delinquent, come on to study!” I would understand that her injunction to play had been only rhetorical. The machine ground on, very regular and very fine.

Today is Teachers’ Day.

If I free-associate, the name of Mother John Baptist comes to my mind. After all, she was my History teacher, and I ‘grew up’ to become a historian. She must have formed me greatly.

Mother John Baptist was tall, thin, pale, square jawed, pretty in her own way, and personable. We, in class 9 and 10, had little idea how to judge age, and she seemed neither young nor old. More old than young, particularly as she started carrying around a cushion to help her be comfortable on our wooden straight backed chairs.

Would it surprise anyone to hear that the dominant memory I have of her classes is of one supreme joke that we attributed to her? Teaching us the list of governors general and viceroys, and advising us as to how to master this long, convoluted list, she was reputed to have told her girls: “Take one man to bed with you every night, and two on Saturday night.” Our life was happy because of this one great witticism.

We did not use text books. We used notes. Their author was Mukherjee. Mukherjee had lightweight paperback books called Ancient, Medieval, and Modern India, as well as European History, Chinese History and everything else. In his notes, he performed the perfect feat of organisation. Every point about every point was included, each numbered and catalogued, and all put together in a schema, which if you just learnt it up, there could be no possibility of not performing excellently.

That is what I and other good students did. We read Mukherjee aloud at home para by para and learnt it up by heart. Never did we imagine that we were supposed to comprehend any of the points and lists we were reading.

What did our teacher do? She would arrive in a swish of white habit (in summer) or black (in winter), much like a graceful full length gown with a cord and cross at her waist, and another swish of her veil that concealed everything but her immediate face. We had never seen a wisp of the hair of any of our nuns: Bernardine, Dolores, Lucy, Cyril, Agnes, Francis. Until suddenly there was a reform in their denomination and their gowns became shorter, their veils exposing their foreheads, even hairlines, and necks. They were not ‘Mothers’ anymore, but ‘Sisters.’ It was such an unnatural development that many of us have blocked it out from our memory.

Arriving in this cool, graceful swish, she would arrange herself with her cushion on a chair and open her Mukherjee. She simply read out para by para. We listened. Never did we discuss any event or personality, and never did we discuss what it was all about or what it could imply or portend for anything in anyone’s life. We did not not do it. We simply did not imagine it or think about it. The only History we every did, therefore we ever knew, was the reading aloud of Mukherjee.

When I read the same book again at home and learnt it up, why did I not go crazy with boredom? Why did I not revolt at the mindlessness of it all?

I cannot know for sure. But thinking about it as an interesting problem, the following possibilities appear.

Maybe, when Mother John Baptist read out the text, we tuned out and each sat thinking her own thoughts, pleasantly. Mother’s voice rose and fell in a cadence but never required us to respond or show any other signs of listening. Life was good then. We all had our friends and our loves, our rivalries and our schemes. We were not short of mental occupation.

Maybe, when we had to read and learn up the text at home, it was a simple enough chore to never feel unpleasant. I do not recollect ever thinking that I had too much to do or that any of it was difficult. What could be difficult about learning up a few pages now and then? And the habit was the key. Since it was the only way to do it, and since doing it was totally unavoidable, there it was. The rewards were, if anything, disproportionate. By exercising only a single faculty of the brain, namely, memory, you could get to be a winner. Score high marks, be applauded, get honours, and so on.

When I think of Mother John Baptist today from the experienced eyes of an education scholar, I feel like saying that she was a good teacher. What more could she have done? The History teaching we experienced was the best in the province, if not in the country. She was articulate, systematic, caring, and regular. We all learnt our subject matter and performed in the exams anywhere from satisfactory to excellent depending on our conscientiousness. No Indian adult had ever experienced History teaching that was radically different, that came anywhere near exploring questions, discussing interpretations, making connections, or doing projects. Where would a teacher get the idea from?

Since Mother John Baptist was Irish, I have to say that the Irish system of teaching must have been exactly like the Indian one.

In any case, if you are going to do the governors-general and viceroys—which thankfully classes 9 and 10 no longer have to do—then perhaps the quickest and simplest way to get them out of the way is to just learn up Mukherjee. Taking one man to bed…

I am sitting in the rays of the rising sun. I am listening to Gurjari Todi. I feel blessed by both things. I worry, incessantly, “How to live in a world that is divided up between the place I am sitting, California, the USA; and a bunch of ideas expressed in worship of the sun and the apropriateness of raga todi in the morning? How can the knowledge each world holds work with the other?”

Ivan Illich had some of the answers. “Equal educational opportunity is,” he writes in Deschooling Society, “both a desirable and a feasible goal, but to equate this with obligatory schooling is to confuse salvation with the Church. School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. The nation-state has adopted it, drafting all citizens into a graded curriculum leading to sequential diplomas not unlike the initiation rituals and hieratic promotions of former times.”

Obligatory schooling, he says. What I study in India is the hundreds of schools around, brimming over with little boys and girls uniformed in blues, browns, checks, and belts, badges and buckles. Their families have gradually got coopted into the belief that schooling is the only path to success. Schooling is  the only path to success–in principle. In practice, the school turns out at the end almost as many children as it took in who have no hope of success. The obligatoriness of schooling is a pure chimera. We must all believe in compulsory schooling, but only if  that schooling did indeed guarantee something like the skills and socialization needed in the modern world.

That if is exactly what Illich questions.

That is what I wish burgeoning, powerful organisations like Pratham would question. Yes, the troubles of Indian education are so great that we should do anything and everything to reduce them. But is literacy the way to go?

India has, extant, buzzing all around, more knowledge and learning that has been produced outside schools, and resides with so-called illiterate and uneducated people, than anyone has bothered to ask about. This is not soft old ‘culture.’ It is knowledge and education.

Futile promises of salvation to the poor, writes Illich. In the course of working with villagers and working class people, you encounter the face of this, a thousand-fold. They or their children have gone to school, some to college. Nothing has resulted. As my friend the boatman says about his son, “Bahut form bhare.” He keeps filling out form after form (for jobs). As an employer of sorts, I have had occasion to interview several candidates who may even have M.A.s or Ph.Ds. Their institutions have played a bad joke on them. They are not qualified to succeed. They have learnt neither their subjects, nor the language it was supposedly taught in, nor even how to spin a good narrative to charm the interviewer.

A graded curriculum, chides Illich. Of course, there must be a curriculum. The seemingly un-structured pathshala or maktab courses of study, so berated by colonial observers, all had a curriculum. But it was, it can and should be, at the service of the teacher. At present, in India, it rules. Teachers and administrators serve it, and cite it as their lord and master. Nothing is more pathetic than to talk to a teacher about why she is not using certain friendly methods in her class or giving attention to students who are obviously lost. The answer always is, “Kya kare? Syllabus cover karna hai. Board examske liye tayari karni hai.” What can I do? I have to cover the syllabus. I have to prepare them for the Board exams.

This is said even by kindergarten teachers. Lest it be supposed that I am talking of the worst schools and the worst teachers, let me add that it has been said by the nuns of St. Mary’s, which has a Montessori section in its kindergarten. I was curious as to why they had locked up all their apparatus and was told this.

India has not invented modern schooling. But it can de-invent it. Indians learnt ‘schooling’ and got ‘schooled’ under colonialism. It can ‘de-school’ itself in a powerful, imaginative way.

What we have to do is the following.

We can agree to accept modern schools and the idea of liberal education with its disciplinary enquiries for their own sake. It is an expensive proposition but in the world as it stands, it is only fair to our citizen body. However, these modern schools must be cognizant of the rest of education in our society. Our curriculum–and it is up to no one but ourselves to design it–must use the wealth of stories, narratives, genres, images, and symbols so pervasive in our land. Our sciences must include respect for indigenous beliefs and practices. The respect, in turn, will lead to more formal research as the children inculcated with this respect grow into adults. Our curriculum must include our ideas of civility, aesthetics, and well-being.

We are afraid of the family and the community, perhaps. They are definitely sites of practices that we want to turn away from–say, gender inequality, maybe age inequality.  But all curriculum making has to pick and choose, to include and discard. When are we going to face that, instead of being merely derivative and copying the mistakes of the industrialised nations?

We could be the one place in the world where a major initiative was taken to respect the knowledges of the un-schooled. We could be the ones to plan–with all the management acumen that we supposedly have–a mass schooling system that did not discredit the unschooled as inferior, or mechanically replace a thousand humane practices with capitalist consumerism and mechanical functioning.  

Ivan Illich wrote, of course, decades ago. It is time that we had a conversation about him, as about so many other issues in Indian education.

Imagine a world where one seamlessly associated the morning sun with a morning raga, and it was not a question of modernity versus tradition and west versus east.

I am uncertain where it came from but right from my childhood I knew that the aim of life was to be “great.”

One place this came from was my army of forefathers and foremothers. I can see them now. Barely smiling, dressed in tailored pants and cotton saris, never muddying their hands, intelligent beyond dispute, this group ran the universe. They were too smart to be masters of the universe because that would mean to work too hard. They were so smart that they knew where to draw the line with work and then to simply rest, or socialize, or go on a trip. Their smartness did not have to be proved. They worked just enough to live in comfort. What they did not have was justified as undesirable because, look at the poor buggers who chased those things! Sweating day and night! Slaving! Oppressed! Everything was measured by them by their own measuring rods, so of course they measured up.

They would not claim that they were “great,” however.

How, then, did they convey this ideal to me? There were some areas of life where they never compromised. I am trying desperately to keep the picture of this group in front of my eyes as I write, and they, being themselves, fade in and out. There is Mahesh nana and Malti nani, each as square jawed as the other. Both brilliant students, he a High Court judge, she a discourse specialist and mystery. There is R.P. nana, bare nana and Shanti nani, he a member of the Public Service Commission and author, she an artist and mystery. There is Kanti nani and her husband, whose name I momentarily forget, he a Secretary of the Government of India many times over, including Principal Secretary of the Prime Minister, she a mystic and mystery. And there is K.B. nana and Indo nani, he likewise a Secretary of the GOI and Ambassador several times over, she an artist.

They became whatever they did because they studied hard. They never compromised in this. It was not all right to come second. There was first and only first.

So at least I was taught. At a ridiculously early age I remember thinking of the number two, in the context of a class or a report card, as unfamiliar and bizarre, a number that could never be attached to oneself. It was someone else’s number. My own was specifically number one. Speaking of hegemony, this was accomplished by the smoothest of means by the parents. There was no preaching, no threats, no abuse, no bribery and no blackmailing. There was no forced discipline and no consciousness of anything being ever suggested. Just the most natural, matter-of-fact assumption that of course, Nita had to stand first in class.

In Intermediate (classes 11 and 12) I stood second. I knew that the report card did not lie because I knew quite well how I had slipped in my sixteenth and seventeenth year, become lovelorn and confused, and had confronted the final exams half-prepared. But there was a hush of disbelief all around. Baba, my grandfather, drew me to his bed-ridden side and said gently, “Don’t worry. They make bad mistakes in the reports sometimes. We will enquire and have it set right.”

Now this non-compromise in exam results was a good base for the future of a stable career, I grant, but what career? It was a perfect system in the days when all good careers rested on exam results of one kind or the other. After 12 years of topping in school you had the hang of succeeding in any exams anytime.

But times were a-changing. Young people discovered one after the other that in fact they were not willing to dedicate their lives to the professions of their parents and grandparents. New, dangerous- seeming occupations beckoned. Teaching. Writing. Journalism. The arts. Media. Entrepreneurship. For all these there was no entrance exam and no placement test. You wrote a book or you produced a performance piece or you raised the funds or you impressed appropriate people with appropriate qualities. Sometimes, to do this, you worked unseemingly hard and denied yourself the leisure, socialization and fun trips that your family felt you should have.

I was at the cusp of this change. I escaped falling mechanically into the rut of the previous generation but failed to completely trust my impulses about what suited me in the changing world. At any rate, I did not enter my profession through an exam.

Now, how to be “great”?

Well, now I have to fight off the great lesson taught me hegemonically, non-violently, so smoothly as to make me consider it to be coincidental with happiness itself. It is not enough to do the minimum possible to be ahead of a peer group. It is lazy to think competitively and be smug with the satisfaction of topping among a randomly selected cohort. The lesson my forebears never taught me is to think, with all the seriousness one is capable of, “What do I believe in? What do I wish to achieve? What will it take from me to achieve it?”

Well, of course, they would say, “But we all know the answers to that. The proof lies in our own level of comfort in our lives.”

Yes, it does. For a government servant. For his wife, the mysterious artist.

But, to keep the search light on the problem, and not on them particularly, the simple fact is that in certain professions, such as the IAS, IPS and IFS, you can only excel through an initial brilliance and then superciliousness. The person assumes that this is what excellence is. He can forget that in other professions you may need to imagine a new outcome, and compete, if that is the right term at all, only with yourself and your tendency towards inertia.

A bureaucrat does not want to change people, which is my profession as a teacher. He does not want to change the world, which is my other profession as an activist. My forefathers taught me that I must be great but they only knew their own professional fields and thus taught me the wrong lessons regarding technicalities.  The writing of a book or an article, the delivering of a lecture, the putting together of a grant proposal—these are not tasks that should be done simply so as to put the best appearance forward, telling oneself inside one’s head, “Of course I do not really care.” 

As it turns out I need techniques exactly the opposite of those imbibed by me as a child and youth!

 

 

Indians are buying more cell phones per minute than anyone else in the world. The man who sells tea, the man who delivers milk, the man who sweeps the streets, even the man who scampers up a tree to cut down coconuts, all use cell phones for work—to deliver their products, it seems—and for pleasure, to stay in touch with migrated sons, make travel plans, find out the weather in distant places, and so on.

Judging by this, Indians have achieved both freedom and individualism at one stroke. Just two years back, when I spoke in a presentation about the nature of Indian modernity and said that Indian youth were not comfortable going against the wishes of their parents and thus lacked the concept of  ‘individualism,’ I was told seriously by someone in the audience, “Let them all buy cell phones.” It was resonant of the Marie Antoinette idea.

We all hope that there is no comparison and that our progressing India won’t come down with a crash as did the French monarchy. But for that, we must think and assess more carefully than we are doing.

Our present educational system has a certain structure, an ideology, a technology and a set of values. These are basically continuous from when they were introduced in the second half of the nineteenth century, with all kinds of changes that always occur with the passage of time. The structure: top down control at the provincial level with fixed examination and curricula, inspections and criteria for affiliation with examining agencies. Ideology: there are certain knowledge areas that must be covered for students to become ‘educated.’ Technology: modern style classrooms and activity spaces, modern, furnished classrooms with modern resources, no matter how basic; English language teaching or use as a medium of instruction if possible; teachers with a B.Ed. degree. Values: literacy and formal schooling is normatively good; illiteracy and informal education is inferior; schools are secular, egalitarian places; the past is an objectified reality; India is a romantic, diverse cultural space with no real issues.

Over the century that there was a colonial state in India and then over the sixty years that India has been an independent state, many criticisms have been levied at the educational system. In the structure, sometimes the top-down exercise of control is criticised. In the ideology, less so, except perhaps the lack of delineation of ‘civic values’ and an overall discomfort with the quality of teaching. The technology, unfortunately, is hardly targeted for proper assessment except for the repeated observation of poverty, as in the broken school building or the over-used single resource of the blackboard. The values are nowhere critiqued except in high academic circles.

There is a huge gap between what critics and academic authors recognise as the problems of colonial discourse in the pre-independence period and its continuity post independence, and what critics and reformers of education recognise as important to do.

Most basically of all, we need a radically different structure, ideology, technology, and set of values that makes a break with our colonial heritage because that colonial system, good as it was for the colonial state and some classes of Indians, is not appropriate for an independent, achievement-oriented state that wants an egalitarian and personally fulfilled citizen body.

The structure we need is a more decentralised one, and more competitive one. Our states are too large and our government machineries too cumbersome to control effectively every school at the village and city level. These municipal and district board schools must also compete with private schools in quality. Their administrators and teachers must be also rewarded, as are private ones, according to the goods they deliver. Only then can we have functioning schools to which an average Indian would choose to send his children.

The ideology we need is a twenty first century one where we know that a different economy with a different set of skills is in place. Older knowledge areas need to be adapted. More flexibility, communication, independence of thought, and creativity needs to be taught, in order for students to be adequately trained for the new century.

The technology we need must take into account our resources and not seek to emulate that of Europe or North America, not least because some of it is wasteful and will itself be perhaps adapted to new stringencies as environmental consciousness dawns further. Our technology should draw further from our own resource base, our materials, our styles, and our genres. We lack attention to the technology appropriate for us in many sphere of life, and education too would only progress if there was sufficient interest in developing adequate technology for Indian classrooms based on Indian arts and sciences.

Finally, the values we need to promote must be discussed. How can we even imagine that we would make a success of our educational system without having extensive public discussions about the kind of citizen we need, the qualities we consider most important, the syntheses we want to make between old and new, past and present, West and east (if we like) and modern and traditional? To say nothing of between different communities, vegetarianism versus non-vegetarianism, and gender and class? Again, it is a colonial hang up to retreat from these discussions. The colonial state made all such talk ‘political,’ and made it difficult for Indians to risk career and good standing if they indulged in it. But every independent country has fashioned its educational system only upon persistent and vigorous discussion of what its values, concordant and discordant, are; what it wishes to preserve and discard; how it must adapt to changes; what its narrative of the self is. Just because the colonial state considered that ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’ or upper caste and lower caste could never successfully talk to each other in the India they ruled and would leave behind, is not to say that it is true. Not only can we talk among ourselves, we absolutely have to, in order to know what we are teaching in our schools and how.

In short, whether through commission or omission, our work in education shows a place rich still with the practices and consciousness of our colonial past. It is time to move on. It is time to start working on these basic needs and not only the easier consumption growth of cell phones and computers.

Sure, India and Pakistan fight, and India and China fight, in both cases over pieces of territory. These are all post 1940s quarrels. The date is significant because that is when India, Pakistan, China all become independent nation states. Fighting before that date had been between dynasties, tribes, kingdoms and colonizing powers.

Among these colonizing powers have been the leaders of nationalism in the world: France, England, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark. Why do we forget this? Probably because they have other achievements to their credit that outweigh the ignominy of colonisation. They excelled in cultivating crops, in building up cities, in rationalising commerce and production, in ensuring health and education for their populations, in patronising the arts and creating things of beauty. No one can dispute that the earliest nation states have achieved great things and it is a pleasure to observe them and presumably, to belong to them.

And the later nation states? Such as ours, born in the 1940s and after?

Obviously we are not terrific successes. We have drought and floods, our cities are garbage and slum-ridden, our commerce and production is fraught with inefficiency and irrationality, our government is corrupt, and our populations are deprived of good health care, education, mobility and the arts.

Somewhere we are going wrong in producing a certain kind of thinker and actor. A citizen of India is apparently not equipped to fight the battles and meet the challenges within the country as he is to fight battles with others outside and face the challenges on his borders.

We are going wrong because we do not teach the correct nationalism in our schools.

Children who graduate from schools, our young educated youth, are not full of the pride in their nation that would motivate them to use their education and energies to resolve the shortcomings in our medical, educational, urban, rural, administrative infrastructures, towards living a life of the kind they read about and view in the media. “Nationalism” for them, if it means anything at all,  means a mindless defence and defensiveness about the nation, not a practical construction of its amenities.

Here is the evidence. In the smaller classes, say 1 and 2, children in an average school learn up by rote the names of India’s main rivers, mountains, festivals. To spell them correctly and repeat exactly the five taught is the exercise, and not to identify anything on a map, to discuss it intelligently, to grasp its context or implication, or to feel anything for it. A huge potential is lost given the high level of children’s emotional energies at this age. For annual programmes, children are dressed up and taught to re-create scenes from India’s past and present. They look very cute. But neither they nor the adults concerned make any connection between the performances and life around.

What could we do? Even small children should be taken to observe instances around them of the topics they are studying: a river, another geographical feature, a house design, a craft, an occupation, a personage, a cultural event, an everyday practice. When they use the term “Indian” they should think, not of an abstraction, like the flag, but of life around them. They should also actively clean up their classrooms, learn to dispose of garbage, eschew plastics, practice civic values in class and discuss everything with teachers equipped with ideas, books, crafts and performance training.

In class 3, children often start studying about the states of India. They go through them, chapter by chapter, locating the main crops, minerals, rivers, and towns in each, culminating in a picture of the native dress of the province and a festival scene. They learn through questions and answers and regurgitate. My evidence comes from observing scores of schools from the 1980s to today, talking to teachers and children, having two children of my own go through mainstream Indian schools briefly, and remembering my own schooldays decades ago.

What the children could  do is some in-depth projects on selected topics located in different parts of India. As we all know, where the hands are involved, learning is deeper and more meaningful. The projects could be simple, and even if no materials were available could consist totally of story-telling and performance, at zero cost.

Nowadays Environmental Studies has replaced Social Studies in the lower classes. It is an improvement, but the teaching has remained the same: questions and answers to be written and memorised. Teachers should be made confident and competent to take the lessons one at a time, and select from them as needed for the same hands-on in-depth work as described above. Actual interactions with brooms and garbage cans will do more for teaching children how to be a good Indian than learning in words what cleaning up means.

Then in higher classes, as children begin to study History and Geography, and then focus on Ancient, Medieval and Modern India, and Civics and Economics, the possibilities change. Now there is room for more narratives, and progressively complex ones. If children can read many stories about the past and present of their countries, about great and ordinary people, about different circumstances and events, they will identify with the landscape and history and society of their country as in no other way. The imagination is fired by fiction as it is by little else. Such stories of course need partly to be written and illustrated. Some exist but a great many more are needed.

Together with the narratives, growing children need a lot of discussion and interactive exercise such as team games, debates, writing and speaking exercises. This is well explored in the world literature on Social Studies teaching and we do not need to re-invent the wheel. We need to only apply even a fraction of these teaching resources to our own country’s materials to make our own children feel excited and knowledgeable about their country.

In languages, music and art there are similar potential areas to be used imaginatively to make children feel actively interested in life around them, excited by its variety and complexity, and stimulated to think of problems creatively as avenues for their hard work or genius.

There is no reason to think that we in India have any particular problem in educating our children to be active citizens who can concern themselves with actively bringing their nation to a state of excellence.

It has just not been sufficiently tried.

K is for Krishna

When he plays the flute, everyone is charmed. They drop what they are doing and come running. When he interacts with someone, the result is a complex emotion: excitement, devotion, passion, the regret of parting, the sorrow of separation, jealousy. When he speaks on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, the doctrine of bhakti is revealed. For scholars and devotees alike, there is no one quite like the Vaisnava deity Krishna, a conjunction of prince, popular hero, child, lover, trickster, god. Partly because we cannot escape him we should ask: what could be the advantages and disadvantages of using Krishna in education?

First, the problems. When I visit a school I find that both the Principal’s office and the Teachers’ Room are devoid of any purposeful art or writing on the walls and the only thing—apart from the essential time-table—are some randomly chosen calendars with bright pictures. Among these, Krishna, either as flute-playing object of love, or as the propounder of bhakti, is prominent. Classrooms are, typically, bare of any posters or charts, except again for the occasional calendar with one of the Hindu gods. What does this tell us? That a certain modern practice is not yet internalised by Indians. As the author Geetanjali Shree says in her novel Mai “We had not yet learnt to hang up pictures on our wall.” This is fine as history. But our schools should do better. They are striving to teach children to be modern. And part of the requirements of a modern framework of schooling is a learning-friendly atmosphere in which the child’s interest is stimulated by various devices. Our calendar pictures in schools show an ignorance of this rule.

Second, Krishna is of course an avatar and therefore Bhagwan or god himself for believers. To introduce him in places of public life merely as a picture or a symbol does justice neither to religion nor to secularism. Looking at the vision of “god” sporting with milkmaids in a bright garden, how is the child supposed to relate to it? We may presume that he is not mature enough to think to himself, “Ah, here is the Supreme Being that pervades the Universe who in this particular form is making itself accessible to our limited human capacities.” Or “This is a version of the painting produced in the 17^th century ateliers of northwest India. Mark the fine penmanship.” Is he/she supposed to think, “Oh, I recognise this. Krishna Bhagwan. Let me bow in reverence;” or (if an older he): “I wonder what it feels like to chase girls around like this?” and (if an older she): “That makes me uncomfortable, to have my clothes hidden and be left publicly naked.” No, we are all saying already. No, no, no. The child is of course not supposed to relate to a picture (an innocent picture some of us are adding) in this way. That is bizarre. The child is supposed to think nothing and to feel nothing.

We should be aware that this may be a sensitive topic, and yet we should be bold and explore all the positive ways that Krishna could be used for educational purposes in schools. When doing my research on education in India I understood one day with a shock of recognition what nationalists had meant when they declared that they needed to set up alternative schools to the Christian missionary schools and the colonial state’s so-called secular schools. Having watched some school assemblies in missionary schools full of addresses to the father, and some in government schools full of praise to the Motherland, I went to a little school in a gali in Chauk in Banaras and almost wept to hear the little voices sing a bandish (composition) in raga yaman. I did not pay attention to the words because I know that in all the bandishes’ words are unimportant. But the beauty of the piece! The riches! The possibilities!

We need to think carefully, wisely, smartly, how we could use the bountiful resources that we already have from a centuries’ old musical history without getting embroiled in the trading of one missionary activity for another, such as became unavoidable at an earlier period of our history.

The difficult step to take is to actively work to change around a lived-in culture to an objectified one. Instead of a practice, to develop a product. Not doing so will result in a gradual extinction of the practice and the replacement of its function with a derived practice from elsewhere. None of this is deplorable in a naive sense. As I said above, historical processes are fine, being in a sense the will of the people. But as conscious educators we could think of the advantages of an objectification of some of our lived-in culture. What I mean by this is to deliberately use cultural practices for educational purposes. Thus, for instance, have a syllabus of study of Indian Music for pre-schoolers and primary schoolers. Many of our bandishes where Krishna figures would be adapted for children in intelligent, humorous ways. Similar translations can take place in art and dance and theatre. The result would be an incredibly intensified learning of the arts. This is good for children, since through the arts they could learn everything better and be holistically better students. It is also good for India because such learning would produce an internal culture market of consumers and audience, adults who had encountered the arts as children.

K is for kites, unfortunately another lived-in cultural practice that has not been successfully objectified and used by educators in our country. There is an unspoken division of our child population into those disciplined children who are scrubbed and bright and do their school work and the recommended extra activities, and grow up to be successes in the adult world; and those happy children who either drop out of school, or do not devote enough time to their studies, are simply under-disciplined, and find the time to fly kites.

Kites have a venerable tradition in our country of being a fun and inexpensive sport. A modern film about children sings of the screwed up adult world contrasted to the child’s world of a kite flying in the breeze. Instead of this dichotomy, we could extend education in the needed directions by introducing freedom and beauty into it, symbolised by kite-flying, as well as use our own cultural practices to construct our own identities, rather than imitate others’ practices and identities.