Hindu Textbooks
Amitava Kumar on English Textbooks
The Hindu, Literary Review, October 2, 2005
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.
****
* In the same issue of the Hindu, the following commentary on Amitava Kumar's Bombay-London-New York was also published. The writer is Pradeep Sebastian.
On an impulse, I decided to read Amitava Kumar's Bombay, London, New York again. I read it in a hurry when it first came out in 2002, noting with pleasure that it was, among many other things, the first really good book on reading written by an Indian. Reading it this time, I discovered with excitement that it is not only still the best Indian book about how and why we read but also an original, riveting piece of non-fiction. (His last book, Husband of a Fanatic is another brilliantly sustained work of literary non-fiction). Bombay, London, New York is a meditation on the self, the home and the world as experienced in books — a sort of "Amitava Through the Looking Glass of Books." It had been a long time since I read a book with such absorption. When I first began to reread it a few weeks ago, I read chapter after chapter hungrily, admiring its quiet brilliance, taking pleasure in its prose. I realised I would finish it too quickly and wanted to savour it. I took to rationing the chapters — two a day, I decided. One day I found myself returning eagerly from wherever I had gone to get back to the book.
While the theme of Diaspora runs memorably through his work, Kumar uses it to explore what home means in poignant, complex ways. "What I am always going back to is the moment when I was going away," he writes in Bombay, London, New York. "The movement I am most conscious of now is the movement of memory, shuttling between places. One place is home, the other the world." The different journeys Amitava Kumar makes in the book — actual and from memory — are insightful, deeply moving and clarifying for both the reader at home and the reader abroad. His perspectives are tough minded, unsentimental, nuanced. For instance, in the chapter "Traveling Light," he writes that what he is asking for is not that we turn our backs on the past but, "Rather, the point is to ascertain what our narratives of travel are going to be... what I'd like to know more about are the day to day struggles, successes, failures, and confusions of the ones who leave home to seek better fortune elsewhere. And equally crucial, what I want to see are accounts of what is suffered as well as celebrated in the most ordinary of ways by those who do not leave, those who stay behind, whether because they want to or simply because it cannot be otherwise... What if we were to replace all the hypocritical, self- mythologising accounts of expatriate fiction... with imaginative maps of toils and tales of small, unnoticed triumphs?"
The book's structure is beguiling: moving back and forth in suspenseful and surprising ways from personal narrative to marginalia on contemporary Indian fiction to cultural and political criticism. The photographs (by the author) that accompany the book are lovely — both the pictures themselves and the idea to use them that way. (One photograph in it — two young, striking looking South Asian women taking a cigarette break on a stoop — is something you almost want to own: It feels like a favourite still from a favourite movie.) The epilogue titled "Indian Restaurant," an account of an older, burnt-out academic, Shastriji, befriending a younger Kumar at an American university, reads like a wonderful chapter from a novel you don't want to see end. (His new, eagerly awaited, yet-to-be-out-book is a novel!)
I have a favourite passage in the book: a visit Kumar makes to the Khudabaksh library in Patna, his hometown. With my love for descriptions of the holding and handling of books, I found myself seduced. The library, the author tells us, is perhaps the richest manuscript library on Islam in the world and it is full of hidden treasures, such as 22,000 handwritten books, out of which at least 7,000 are rare manuscripts. The old, gentle librarian with his shaky right hand shows Kumar a "priceless book of poems by the Persian Hafiz that was presented by the Mogul ruler Humayun to the emperor of Iran... The librarian's dark finger hovers over the lines that the emperor had inscribed. The page is filigreed in gold, the bare portions stained with age. I want to touch the page myself. I ask the librarian's permission, and he says yes, I gently place my index finger where the emperor has signed his name."
What is particularly remarkable about Amitava Kumar's writing (to read his essays look at http://www.amitavakumar.com/) is the way he puts himself on the line over and over again in a way few Indian writers would. He writes in the tradition of the best personal essayists such as Philip Lopate, Joan Didion and Vivian Gornick, who write about the self and the world with a sense of discovery and intrepid candour. Kumar takes himself as the starting point and then goes on to examine his relationship with the world with even rarer, brutal, moving honesty. And yet the personal details in his books don't amount to self-absorption or self-promotion: more remarkably, his presence in the narrative, because of the risks he takes, feels self-effacing, illuminating, heroic.
The Hindu, Literary Review, October 2, 2005
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.
****
* In the same issue of the Hindu, the following commentary on Amitava Kumar's Bombay-London-New York was also published. The writer is Pradeep Sebastian.
On an impulse, I decided to read Amitava Kumar's Bombay, London, New York again. I read it in a hurry when it first came out in 2002, noting with pleasure that it was, among many other things, the first really good book on reading written by an Indian. Reading it this time, I discovered with excitement that it is not only still the best Indian book about how and why we read but also an original, riveting piece of non-fiction. (His last book, Husband of a Fanatic is another brilliantly sustained work of literary non-fiction). Bombay, London, New York is a meditation on the self, the home and the world as experienced in books — a sort of "Amitava Through the Looking Glass of Books." It had been a long time since I read a book with such absorption. When I first began to reread it a few weeks ago, I read chapter after chapter hungrily, admiring its quiet brilliance, taking pleasure in its prose. I realised I would finish it too quickly and wanted to savour it. I took to rationing the chapters — two a day, I decided. One day I found myself returning eagerly from wherever I had gone to get back to the book.
While the theme of Diaspora runs memorably through his work, Kumar uses it to explore what home means in poignant, complex ways. "What I am always going back to is the moment when I was going away," he writes in Bombay, London, New York. "The movement I am most conscious of now is the movement of memory, shuttling between places. One place is home, the other the world." The different journeys Amitava Kumar makes in the book — actual and from memory — are insightful, deeply moving and clarifying for both the reader at home and the reader abroad. His perspectives are tough minded, unsentimental, nuanced. For instance, in the chapter "Traveling Light," he writes that what he is asking for is not that we turn our backs on the past but, "Rather, the point is to ascertain what our narratives of travel are going to be... what I'd like to know more about are the day to day struggles, successes, failures, and confusions of the ones who leave home to seek better fortune elsewhere. And equally crucial, what I want to see are accounts of what is suffered as well as celebrated in the most ordinary of ways by those who do not leave, those who stay behind, whether because they want to or simply because it cannot be otherwise... What if we were to replace all the hypocritical, self- mythologising accounts of expatriate fiction... with imaginative maps of toils and tales of small, unnoticed triumphs?"
The book's structure is beguiling: moving back and forth in suspenseful and surprising ways from personal narrative to marginalia on contemporary Indian fiction to cultural and political criticism. The photographs (by the author) that accompany the book are lovely — both the pictures themselves and the idea to use them that way. (One photograph in it — two young, striking looking South Asian women taking a cigarette break on a stoop — is something you almost want to own: It feels like a favourite still from a favourite movie.) The epilogue titled "Indian Restaurant," an account of an older, burnt-out academic, Shastriji, befriending a younger Kumar at an American university, reads like a wonderful chapter from a novel you don't want to see end. (His new, eagerly awaited, yet-to-be-out-book is a novel!)
I have a favourite passage in the book: a visit Kumar makes to the Khudabaksh library in Patna, his hometown. With my love for descriptions of the holding and handling of books, I found myself seduced. The library, the author tells us, is perhaps the richest manuscript library on Islam in the world and it is full of hidden treasures, such as 22,000 handwritten books, out of which at least 7,000 are rare manuscripts. The old, gentle librarian with his shaky right hand shows Kumar a "priceless book of poems by the Persian Hafiz that was presented by the Mogul ruler Humayun to the emperor of Iran... The librarian's dark finger hovers over the lines that the emperor had inscribed. The page is filigreed in gold, the bare portions stained with age. I want to touch the page myself. I ask the librarian's permission, and he says yes, I gently place my index finger where the emperor has signed his name."
What is particularly remarkable about Amitava Kumar's writing (to read his essays look at http://www.amitavakumar.com/) is the way he puts himself on the line over and over again in a way few Indian writers would. He writes in the tradition of the best personal essayists such as Philip Lopate, Joan Didion and Vivian Gornick, who write about the self and the world with a sense of discovery and intrepid candour. Kumar takes himself as the starting point and then goes on to examine his relationship with the world with even rarer, brutal, moving honesty. And yet the personal details in his books don't amount to self-absorption or self-promotion: more remarkably, his presence in the narrative, because of the risks he takes, feels self-effacing, illuminating, heroic.
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