Textbook of Laughter and Forgetting
We have repeatedly witnessed in recent years, almost like the seasonal outbreak of a distressing form of cholera, controversies over the contents of history textbooks.
But why is there no discussion about what school-children are asked to read in their English textbooks?
I have very little memory now of what I had read in the books used in my history classes, although I do remember the attention with which I would copy out on clean sheets of paper the line-drawings that represented the portraits of emperors. Akbar’s moustache drooped. Humayun was thin and wizened, already preparing, it seemed, for a premature death. The rounded lines in the portrait of Shah Jahan contained all the sorrow of love’s futile striving. Nearly everything else in those books escapes me at the moment.
This might be entirely because I was a mediocre student and, like the uninspired everywhere, I found my classes stultifying. But the fact remains that I still have vivid and exact memories of what I read in my English textbooks. It was there that I read George Orwell’s account of shooting an elephant in Burma, Dom Moraes on a trip to the Thar, Khushwant Singh’s depiction of life in the village of Mano Majra, Somerset Maugham describing the solitude on his seventieth birthday.
When I was sixteen, I left my hometown Patna to go to school in Delhi. The school where I got admission, Modern School on Barakhamba Road, was a prestigious enclave where the children of the rich and the powerful came each day as if they were visiting a familiar club. Our teachers, for the most part drawn from the Punjabi middle-class, could only use a puritanical and unimaginative pedagogy to prop themselves up against the display of wealth. They knew in their hearts that they were superfluous and stuck to the dull routine of making us read and repeat the words in the textbooks prescribed by the school board.
Nevertheless, the English textbooks that I read and reread during those two years gave me a sense of language and an idea of how to express my own sense of the world that I inhabited. This is what literature can do, even without your knowing it. Shouldn’t there be wider debate, then, on what our students read in their books?
I recently received a letter from an editor at Macmillan-India. He had written to say that he was preparing a textbook for the Intermediate level students in Bihar and he wanted permission to use an essay of mine in which I had written about a visit to the Khudabaksh Library in Patna.*
The letter brought back the mixed memories from my youth. In my reply to the editor, I readily granted permission. I didn't ask for any payment. It seemed to me that even one poor student reading me in Bihar would be worth a thousand readers in South Delhi or abroad.
When I remembered my own alienating classroom experiences, it gave me pleasure to think that now a reader in Bihar would be able to rediscover his or her own world in my writing. The names of places as well as the people, the sentiments shared by the writer, even the dust on the streets—all of this would be familiar to the student in towns like Ara or Motihari. How many times before had Bihari students found their lives reflected in the English textbooks prescribed for their courses?
Then, just last week, the postman brought a registered package from India. It was the textbook with my essay in it. I read the book quickly. The search for relevance by the education council had meant not only the inclusion of Bihari writers like Tabish Khair among the contributors but also pieces that provided urgent social critique. A good example was a poem "Voice of the Unwanted Girl" by Sujata Bhatt, written in the voice of a destroyed foetus, presenting a protest against female infanticide. Textbooks elsewhere in India should include writings like this that touch the heart and challenge the mind.
Our students need to be freed from the claustrophobia of the classroom. The prose and poetry that we offer them should appear to them fresh and enlivening. The Macmillian-India book began with a brilliant, hopeful piece by Jawaharlal Nehru, its elegant rhetoric paying homage to the arrival of Gandhi. I felt my senses lift while reading the essay. However, I'd like to see students also reading well-written critical pieces on subjects as seemingly trivial as Bombay films. Let's give them Ashis Nandy's incisive essay on P.C. Barua and Devdas. It will engage—and educate—students as much if not more than Shakespeare and Blake.
Why is it that English textbooks, including the one I was sent, are top-heavy with hagiographies of our national leaders? I have rarely seen letters printed in these books. There is very little travel-writing. There is no space ever for quality journalism. In general, we should also be publishing more women writers. To my students in America, I have taught Mahasweta Devi, Ismat Chughtai, Urvashi Butalia, and Arundhati Roy. Why are these writers not being taught in the places where I studied in India?
In the textbook that sparked these reflections, I found a story by O. Henry called "After Twenty Years." I had read this story in my English class twenty years ago. The lines of dialogue and the characteristic, surprising O. Henry twist at the end of the story came flooding back as I turned the pages. But this experience also made me distrust my pleasure and my nostalgia. Why are textbooks so remarkably unchanged even after decades?
The most disturbing aspect of the controversies over the history textbooks has been the extent to which current political interests determined what was taught in the classroom. That was detrimental, no doubt, but in the matter of English textbooks the opposite has been true. Our textbooks have remained for the most part trapped in the bubble of their own past. They continue to be hodge-podge collections of quaint pieces, somewhat suspect in their usefulness, a bit like the clay-objects strewn beside a corpse in a ceremonial grave. It is no surprise that in our professional use of the English language, as a people, we remain stiff, formal, awkward. Unless these textbooks are radically changed, our teachers will remain mummy-makers, wrapping cotton around our children's mouths.
