By Mridula Chakraborty
In September 2014, my niece sent me some photographs of herself dressed in a sari, taking up her role as ‘teacher-for-the-day’ at a prestigious school in New Delhi. Apart from the pride I took in my niece’s moment of honour, I was transported back to that pleasurable time decades ago, when I too had donned such a mantle and experienced, for a few hours, what it is that teachers commit themselves to, day in and day out.
This ‘Teachers’ Day’ is an annual honouring of teachers in India and has been celebrated since 1962, every year, on 5th September, to mark the birthday of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the first Vice-President of India (1952-1962) and the second President of India (1962-1967). Dr Radhakrishnan believed that “teachers should be the best minds in the country” and till this day, 5th September is observed in schools around the country as that special day when teachers are felicitated by students and then taken off to a picnic, while students take their place in the classrooms.
In recent years, however, there have been demands from sections of Dalit activists, intellectuals and students to celebrate Teachers’ Day on 3rd January, the birthday of Savitribai Phule (1831-1897), a teacher and social reformer from a backward caste, who worked tirelessly for the educational uplift of lower castes and classes in India’s hierarchical society. It is a well-known fact that within the knowledge economy of casteism in India, Brahmins held the key to education and Dalits were subjected to discriminatory practices that denied them equal access to resources in schools, colleges and universities. During the long century of struggle that Dalits have had to establish their social position and win legal-political and cultural-educational equality, they have had to reclaim the names of social reformers, educationists and activists who fought to secure their rights in a unequal society. [http://kafila.org/2014/08/18/september-5-as-teachers-day-the-dalit-critique-abhay-kumar/].
When I was growing up in India, I knew nothing of these historical struggles. My history books were full of the names of freedom fighters who agitated against British colonial rule to win Independence for India and my literature books were full of writers who spoke out against injustice and inequity. None of these writers was Dalit, nor did I know the names of the many social reformers who were fighting another battle to secure human dignity and equal status for themselves as citizens of an independent India. It was not till I started working for Katha, a Delhi-based translation publishing house, that I encountered some of the Dalit writers who were drawing attention to this grievous injustice in our socio-cultural and literary spaces. This was an introduction to a completely different universe, a universe from which I had been shielded by what feminist theorist, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, calls “sanctioned ignorance,” and ignorance that is set up, buttressed and scaffolded by the everyday practices of inequality in institutions, media, public and political sphere.
Twenty years later, I found myself in Australia, a nation that intrigued me with its huge red-earth centre, and its history of the oldest continuous human inhabitation and civilisation. By now I had some knowledge of First Nations literature, especially from Canada and the US, and I was looking forward to expanding my limited acquaintance with Indigenous Australian literatures. And here I discovered one of Australia’s best-kept secrets! There had been a tremendous literary flowering in Indigenous literature in the last three decades in Australia in all possible genres: fiction, non-fiction, memoir, poetry, essay, young adult, speculative and science fiction, graphic novels: you name it! It was a fascinating world of which I had known nothing and into which I entered as a complete novice, opening one precious gif of literature after another. And I found myself wondering why it was that outside of Australia, I knew nothing of these writers and their works, and why, even in Australia, there was such lack of awareness about them?
This brings me to why I am writing this blog piece. In 2012, I organised the Australia India Literatures International Forum [http://www.uws.edu.au/writing_and_society/events/australia_india_literatures_international_forum] in Sydney with 12 writers from India and 24 writers from Australia. While there was much energy and excitement between the two groups of writers about their shared interests and literary experiences, one particular statement from that gathering has stayed with me. Sharan Kumar Limbale, one of the invited Dalit writers who writes in Marathi, and whose work, The Outcaste, has been translated into English by Oxford University Press, spoke out about the issues that Dalit and other marginalised writers face, and here I am quoting his words just from memory: “When Dalits write, the editor is a Brahmin, the publisher is a Brahmin, the printer is a Brahmin, the distributor is a Brahmin, the reviewer is a Brahmin, the newspapers and magazines where they are published are essentially Brahmin establishments.” He went on to explain the reasons why Dalit writing does not reach the mainstream, why Dalit literature is often relegated to the status of ‘special interest’ thereby making it seem even more inaccessible, and why it makes the task of consciousness raising that much more difficult. That statement has stayed with me all this time and reminded me again and again why I did not know anything about my own fellow citizens and their work in a country that prides itself on its literary culture and its vibrant democracy.
It is 2014 and I am trying again, in my own small way, to contribute to a bridging of two of the oldest living cultures in the world: LITERARY COMMONS: Writing Australia-India in the Asian century in Indigenous, Dalit and Multilingual tongues [http://www.literarycommons.com/home/], This time, 12 Indigenous writers will visit India to participate in literary festivals and specially convened university for a in 2014. In 2015, we hope that Dalit writers will visit Australia and introduce their exciting work to a new audience. In the last three decades, Dalit literature in India has undergone a tremendous literary renaissance and their work is now being read in national and international contexts. Like Indigenous Australian literature, Dalit writing too imagines a world of equality and creativity where human beings are connected to the earth and its knowledges in intimate ways, where the cultural capital we have inherited from the land through centuries is gifted to the contemporary reader as a balm and a means of survival in the face of increasingly inhuman ways of being. In bringing together writers, this project attempts to provide a space where the writers tell us how to think rather than being dictated by the concerns of a dominant majority readership or by the exigencies of the market. I hope that in the years to come, there will be students who will know about these writers and speak of them with the same familiarity that they reserve for the better known names. And this ultimately is the purpose of education.
That brings me back to what I started with. I hope that in the years to come, the new students an scholars who celebrate Teachers’ Day in India will remember, honour and commemorate the as-yet unnamed and unrecognised teachers from the myriad unprivileged walks of life, who have held on the to traditional knowledges of the land, and from whom we have yet to learn the lessons that will truly nurture and sustain the earth for another few millenia to come.