Fifth Column: Zero Cultural Literacy

India Today
November 9, 1998

FIFTH COLUMN
Zero Cultural

Joshi's plans for education are justified. The alternative has failed.

Tavleen Singh

It is evidence of the deeply degrading effects of colonisation that so many years after the British left it still takes a foreigner to ask the right questions about India. So it was left to the thin lady from Turino to ask the most pertinent questions about the storm over our education system caused by Murli Manohar Joshi's attempts to Indianise it. She attacked the attempted Indianisation on these grounds: "It is implied that curricula hitherto have been un-Indian or anti-Indian. That the curricula have been colonial and foreign, not related to the past and present realities of India." Si senora, they have not.

While Italian nuns in Orbassano were teaching you, as they should, in the best of Italian traditions, I like other Indians was being taught the best of British traditions in our supposedly Indian schools. Our children still are.

So they know all about Shakespeare, Chaucer, Shelley and Keats, with the younger ones adding Michael Jackson and Madonna to the culture imbibed. But ask them about Ghalib, Amir Khusro, Tukaram, Kabir and Kalidasa, and they are likely to know nothing. This is, alas, because of a man called Macaulay who, when he set up our system of education in 1835, wrote: "A single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia."

When the thin lady's revered grandfather-in-law became prime minister, one of the first things he should have done was to Indianise education. He did not. The net result, 50 glorious years after Independence, is that we continue to produce deracinated, deculturalised Indians in our schools and universities. Do we need more proof of this than the fact that our state education ministers were stupid enough to jeer at the Saraswati Vandana as "communal"? If any of them had been educated enough to understand the words, they would have realised there is nothing religious in the content.

It is a hymn to knowledge, whose embodiment according to Indian culture (not religion) is Saraswati. It is probably the most beautiful tribute to learning in the world and any Indian who thinks of it as "communal" should be ashamed. But since we are, nearly all of us, completely illiterate in the traditions of India it is easy to propagate the lie that the recitation of the Saraswati Vandana at an education ministers' conference was an RSS plot. The RSS is also given to singing the national anthem daily at its shakhas. So by the same logic we should give up that as well.

According to Joshi, the committee of experts that recommended the Indianisation of our education system was set up long before he became minister for human resource development (HRD). It was this committee that recommended Indian schoolchildren be taught the Vedas, the Upanishads and Sanskrit. So if the whole thing were an RSS plot then there must have been "communalisation" of the HRD Ministry even before the BJP Government came to power.

The RSS is irrelevant to this debate. The real question is why the Indian education system has been allowed to remain unchanged for 50 years when every education minister must have read Macaulay's offensive Minute of 1835 and known the system he created was designed to turn India into a nation of clerks: "We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect."

M.F. Husain, who has had his share of problems with Saraswati, said to me in an interview not long ago that India's elite had no comprehension of our artistic traditions because of their English education. "We have created a nation of clerks," he said, "babuon ka desh ban gaya hai. Among illiterate villagers there is more comprehension of these traditions." Classical musicians will tell you the same thing.

Schools all over the world teach children about their country's music, literature, art and civilisation. In India, we can't -- for fear our liberal-left intelligentsia may see it as anti-secular. It should be considered outrageous that the Vedas and Upanishads are not already being taught in our schools. Instead, it is considered secular. Should we not be asking some questions?

Politicians of "secular" persuasion tell us that they object to Indianising our education system because they are more concerned about basics. We should be concentrating on things like making primary education compulsory they say. But we have had "secular" rule for 50 years. Why wasn't primary education made compulsory decades ago?

If it had been we would not be the country with the largest number of illiterate people in the world. Joshi is trying to make up for lost time. Along with Indianisation he is also trying to rectify a system of education so tangled in red tape as to have more officials than teachers. He is attempting to involve NGOs working in the villages. But even here he is being attacked for promoting the RSS. Joshi says, "I invited P.D. Chitlangia (allegedly of the RSS) because he is running a network of schools in tribal areas by paying teachers between Rs 10,000 and 15,000 a year. I have to pay Rs 1,00,000 a year to a primary schoolteacher. It is simply not cost-effective."

Actually, a country which has education ministers who jeer at a hymn which says of learning (as Saraswati) that she is the goddess before whom even Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh bow probably deserves to be illiterate.

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