Rural India in City Schools

Villages in our schools

Published in The Hindu’s EDGE on 22^nd July.

Thanks are due to the team at The Hindu.

To Upma and her colleagues I am indebted for the opportunity.

I was asked if I would share some of my experiences of village life with students. This discussion, with students, would precede their trip to an organization working in a rural set-up. I figured that this would be challenging given that most students came from affluent families.  In other words, they would possibly have limited exposure like I once had.

I began on a lighter note with snippets of my ignorance during my initial days in Central India - how it had taken me more than a month’s stay to figure out the significance of 3 tea-stalls in the village, abutting each other and each boasting of strictly loyal clientele - my first lesson in caste. Unlike the illustrations I had come across in text-books, neither was panchayat a meeting with 5 people under a tree, nor was sarpanch the person with biggest head-gear. Couple of years later I moved to another village, further eastwards in our country. Over the period, my awe for the landscapes replaced the shocks and my respect for the people grew. Their abilities to work with hands for example - the sheer range of use they put the same knife (dao) to.

The sharing got a tad serious as I moved to my learning. The initial months brought out that what many of us in cities consider as basic and necessary, is many a time luxury or simply absent in villages. It was at these villages that I learnt how to shower selfless affection - by being at the receiving end. Neither had I met them before nor were there too many similarities in our lives and yet the people showered love and warmth. Over time I realized that that clichés like ‘sleepy old village’, I had grown up with, were as real as ghosts in the villages. And that it was easy to fall into the trap of either patronizing the village people or treating them as exotic creatures. The challenge was to accept the people and village as they were, and treat them as equals.

Back to the discussion; the idea was, with help of anecdotes, to get the students to react and question. The questions ranged from whether I had worked with tribals to what they ate, from how much were the people in villages interested in my life to, of course, which of the stall(s) I had tea at? I was walking a tight-rope. I had to resist either painting a glossy image or underscoring the stereotype. I was keen to convey that life in villages, like elsewhere, is dynamic and that people in villages love, hate, quarrel, celebrate and sing like all of us.

As I sit to draft this, I wonder on my school days - a ‘regular’ English-medium school in an urban area. The school taught me a foreign language, I write this in, but little did it teach me about life in a village; a life majority of my country brethren lived. Home too did little on this front. This was one of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Unlike today, however, villages then did exist in television serials and Hindi movies.

Can we discuss this topic at city schools? To understand that villagers are individuals beyond construction workers and domestic help? To enable the students (and teachers) to know their country better? To highlight the interdependence and enable the students – even a few - to question the current paradigm which is unduly biased in their favour?