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Why we need to 'Indianise' our education system

Why we need to 'Indianise' our education system

Author: Tavleen Singh
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: July 25, 2004
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/archive_full_story.php?content_id=51704

Let me begin by saying that I think Arjun Singh's campaign to ''detoxify'' Indian education is more dangerous than Murli Manohar Joshi's pathetic attempts to Indianise it. Let me add that Indian education must be Indianised. It is pathetic that so many years after the Raj ended, our best schools remain colonial in their curriculum, their medium of instruction and their attitudes. The result is that they churn out Indians so deracinated they know nothing of their own country and culture and so much about Western culture that they spend their lives aspiring to become Xerox Westerners.

As a product of the haute end of Indian education let me tell you my own story as an illustration of the point I am making. Till I went to school the only language I spoke was Punjabi but by the time I left school the only language I spoke was English and I remember being slightly embarrassed by those of my relatives who persisted in speaking only Punjabi. Ditto my compatriots. Whether they were Maharashtrian, Gujarati, Tamil or Bengali they spoke, thought, dreamed in English and were more than a little embarrassed if they happened to have parents who only spoke a native tongue.

After leaving school it took strenuous efforts on my part to learn how to read and write in Hindi but most of my compatriots still speak only English and their children speak only English and are even more deracinated than we were. Most never read an Indian book unless it is written in English, most would not be able to identify a single Indian poet and what most know about Indian civilisation would fit on a postage stamp.

If this disdain for India were confined to the so-called English speaking elite it would not be a problem. Our tragedy is that the problem is much more serious in lesser private schools and state schools because the children that they send out into the world are usually unable to communicate properly in either English or any Indian language. They may be functionally literate at the end of their school days but by no stretch of the imagination could they be described as educated and, extraordinarily, they tend to be as deracinated as their more privileged brethren. The reason for this is that there is nothing in their curriculum that teaches them about India or its civilisation. The odd slogan of the ''Mere Bharat mahaan'' kind might creep in but beyond the slogans there is nothing because ''secular'' education meant not mentioning the word Hindu except pejoratively.

The problem is that Indian civilisation, at the height of its glory, was Hindu civilisation. It was that Hindu civilisation that gave the world the numerals that came to be wrongly described as Arabic and it was that civilisation from which came the Vedas and the Upanishads and religious traditions that are sophisticated and tolerant when compared with those that have come out of the Middle East. But, to say that in India is to risk being labelled anti-Muslim and to praise India's ancient civilisation is to risk being called a saffronite so let me quote the American author, Henry Thoreau instead.

''Whenever I have read any part of the Vedas, I have felt that some unearthly and unknown light illuminated me. In the great teaching of the Vedas, there is no touch of sectarianism. It is of all ages, climes and nationalities and is the royal road for the attainment of the Great Knowledge. When I read it, I feel that I am under the spangled heavens of a summer night.''

When will we allow Indian children to learn about a heritage that is theirs by right? When will we get ourselves an Education Minister educated enough to understand that learning is something that goes beyond the tired cliches of secularism and communalism?

The answer to both those questions is: not for a while. The ''secular'' philosophy of the new government as articulated by Shri Arjun Singh is that anything to do with the word Hindu is necessarily ''saffron'', necessarily ''toxic''.

When our new HRD Minister conducts his ''weeding out'' he might find that there is very little to be done because Murli Manohar Joshi spent more time making a noise than making changes in history textbooks. In all the pamphlets that have been published about the ''saffronisation'' he supposedly instilled you will find more rhetoric and hysteria than examples of changed historical texts.

If Arjun Singh was wiser, better educated, he would have understood that instead of wasting his time on stupidities of this kind he could make a much greater contribution by finding out what can be done to Indianise Indian education. Indian children need to learn not just about ancient India but about modern India as well. They need to read poetry written by Indian poets and literature written by Indian writers writing in native tongues. The fact that all our most celebrated modern writers are those who write in English speaks for itself.

When I last wrote about education in this column, the former Maharajah of Dhrangadhra sent me a copy of a speech made by Lord Curzon at Rajkot's Rajkumar College on November 5, 1900. In his speech, Curzon urges the Indian princes he is addressing to be Indian. ''Though educated in a Western curriculum, they should still remain Indians, true to their own beliefs, their own traditions, and their own people.'' How sad that a British Viceroy could see a hundred years ago what our HRD ministers cannot see even now.

Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com
 


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