EDUCATION AND CULTURE

Of late the authorities of higher education made it compulsory that all disciplines in the universities should have a separate paper on human values and ethics. It is a good move to humanize all science and engineering students but the irony is that even the disciplines of literatures weren’t exempted from that. That literature itself is nothing but an artistic way of asserting the human values and ethics is the basic  truth to be noticed but the way that it is enforced on the contemporary generation of students of higher education asserts the lacuna of a system which  was in vague hither to. This situation further demands the importance of an assessment of the educational system that emerged after independence.

My great grandfather migrated to the far north of erstwhile North Arcot District of British India from the far south of the same district around 1850s on the request of the people of a village there to teach them education. They provided him with a small cottage and gave him a few acres of land for sustenance. The school in those days is called Palukootam, which means the abode of speech. They used to have holidays only on the full moon day (Pournami) and no moon day (Amavaasya). All that the teacher taught was only Telugu, the mother tongue. The syllabus contained the first five parvas of Mahabharatham, Virataparvam, Nalacharithra, a few episodes like Gajendramoksham and Prahlada Charithra from Mahabhagavatham, Ranganatha Ramayanam and some arithmetic essential for the simple life in the villages. Besides teaching these books the teacher of those days in our villages had to train them for enacting plays which were mostly based on the stories of the above classics. All the villagers learnt them enthusiastically and retained the spirit of it throughout. They led a complacent life without any complaints, with stood the ordeals of life majestically and brought up their posterity comfortably.

The education during those days was not confined to the schools as they enjoyed a comprehensive artistic and cultural life .In our place, which is called Thondanadu at that time, an annual 18 day programme called Mahabharatha yajna was regularly conducted in which the story of Mahabharatha was related as a Harikatha( a culture folk form) during the day which synchronized with a performance of the same story as a drama  during the night. The exponents of that performance from Kuppam used to combine folklore and the padyas of great Telugu Bharatham and spellbound the audience throughout the night till the dawn. Many folk performances based on the folk stories like Desinguraja, Nalla Thangaal, Kambojaraja, Kavamma, Balanaagamma and the war of Bobbili were conducted by the itinerant caste artists.

The life in the rural places was closely connected with song and play. The illiterate form workers used to sing many songs while working to dissipate their strain and to entertain themselves. Those songs and stories did glorify many superstitions and evil customs but they had undoubtedly created praiseworthy cultural strata. They lived in the lap of nature without craving for unnecessary physical amenities.

My grandmother used to carry a cloth bag containing books like Oormiladevi Nidra, Pandari bhajanalu and Kusumaharinadh Bhajanalu. She used to read them when she had leisure and used to sing them for us at our request. Like the rustics, we, the children, might not have understood the meaning of it but the melancholic song that described how Oormila warned Lakshmana, her husband, who entered her bedroom after the exile and the way that Lakshmana narrated his experiences in the war with Ravana spellbound us with an inexpressible anguish.

Our simple dwelling, a hut, in our ancestral village always reminds me of the Jangama singers who used to visit us every year in the early hours of the morning of Sankranthi clad in white impeccable dhotis and their song used to reach our house ahead of them piercing the screens of snow of winter:

Parvathaala Saambhasivudu , Bhadreswaraa,

Vachchi Vaakita nilachinaadu,Bhadeswaraa,

Bhagyanomu lichchevaadu,Bhadreswara,

Punnemunomu lichhevaadu,Bhadreswara,

Oruganti Sambhasivudu,Bhadeswara,

Vaalaalaade Velalayya, Bhadeswaraa…

The Jangama singers might have been beggars though some of them took it up as a sacred duty to visit the villagers to bless them. The bad and evil, however attractive and fascinating they might be, should be driven out. All those classics and folk songs eulogized caste, untouchability, gender discrimination and unequal distribution of wealth. And so getting rid of them is summarily justifiable. But the unfortunate thing is that a healthy cultural life is gone along with that as we couldn’t nurture an alternative cultural environment.

The government has rightly taken over the field of Education after the independence. Government schools were established, the training colleges for the teachers were started and score of bodies that design the syllabus of every possible phase of education were constituted. The students had to follow three language system but the importance of the mother tongue wasn’t properly protected and the cultural bearing of the education was not efficiently imbibed. For a long time we believed that praising the old and denouncing the present is a characteristic feature of the cynical people and thus failed to realize the deterioration of standards in education.

The importance given to the books published in English and to the western educational system is highly disproportionate with their Indian counterparts. Majority of the decisions of the government and the reservation policies aren’t in tune with the upgrading of the system. Many contemporary scholars like U R Ananthamurthy pointed out that a true genius would be born in his mother tongue only. But the efforts to translate the knowledge into the mother tongue are far from satisfactory.

Way back around in 1920s Rabindranath Tagore wrote a fable entitled, Parrot’s Training. A king who wanted to educate a parrot assigned that duty to his nephews who constructed a huge edifice called school, employed innumerable teachers and imported thousands of books. When the bird fluttered its wings they summoned carpenter to make a cage for it and a goldsmith was also employed to forge a chain to clip its wings. The king got immensely satisfied by inspecting the arrangements and after some days summoned his nephews to send the bird to exhibit its training in the court. Then the nephews forced the bird to utter at least two alphabets and when it failed they pushed a paste of the books into its throat. The soldiers took the dead bird to the court; the king pressed its throat and got terribly satisfied by hearing the rustling of the papers as he felt that the education of the bird was successfully completed.  

Plenty of water passed under the bridge since the writing of that story.  Now the bird is leaving the school with many degrees but, to put it in the same allegorical method of Tagore, the person who has left the school is none other than the goddess Saraswathi. We chose an amalgamated system of education of the East and the West after the independence but unfortunately it is not of the good qualities but of the bad. It is high time to introspect and revise before it gets too far to correct.

                                                 -MADHURANTHAKAM NARENDRA

 (The writer is a bilingual short story writer, novelist and poet, writing in both Telugu and English)