INDIA EMPOWERED TO ME IS

When we delete religion from our textbooks, teach dignity of Labor

Kancha Ilaiah 

Published on February 13, 2007

As a child when I followed my illiterate shepherd father, neither my parents nor my village social forces knew what India meant, where its borders began and where they ended. This was true of many village communities all over India.

Whether the social mass in the village India was free or was bonded was decided on the caste position within the village but not based on nationality of that mass. The nationhood of India was not existent for them. For them, the notion nation had no meaning whatsoever.

If somebody was born in an upper caste, he/she had more freedom and more respect of self and of the other than those who were born in lower castes. If somebody was born in a Madiga/Chamar family, he/she was born bonded and untouchable. His/her self was untouchable to all the castes above that one. For any village being, the social location in the caste system gave both power/wealth or powerlessness/poverty. For a long time the nation with its power or powerlessness did not peep into our lives.

The real villages were not like Karl Marx's imagined villages. They were neither self sufficient independent entities within themselves nor were they socially and economically connected to one another so intimately. They were messy places in plains adjacent to forests. The connection between village and village was limited. People's connections were within their respective castes even of other villages. Social life was stifled and economic life was primitive and precarious.

With a Government school coming into the villages in early Sixties, the nation began to connect with the village. Child education became a symbolic dream of their nationalist modernity. Education landed in our village like a helicopter of election season. In any early formative linguistic state, a beginning of modern education in a newly fashioned nationalist language�Telugu, Kannada so on�setting aside the caste-tribal languages, in which social groups were communicating with each other was cultural long jump.

School brought into our life symbols of nationalism�quite innocently the religious symbols of the dominant castes, as they wrote the lessons in the image of their culture: the culture of Hinduism. A Muslim child was to learn that culture as his/her�though not of his/her�as national. Rama and Krishna were put in our lives as national heroes but not as religious heroes of particular religion. Rig Veda and Bhagavad Gita were said to have been the most inspiring nationalistic books.

The born bonded children�I mean the Dalit children�were not yet entering into the school but here and there, there were Muslim and Christian children in early days of education. If a Dalit family became Christian, the nationalist teacher would allow that family's child to sit in the class as touchable. But while teaching about Hindu God's image as nationalist image there were no doubts in the mind of teacher that religion and nation were two different things. If there was a Muslim or Christian teacher he/she could not dare to say that Quran or Bible was a nationalist book too. Thus, nationalism and Hinduism became synonymous. Naturally who got empowered morally and ideologically in that environment? A Hindu nationalist. Neither a Muslim nor a Christian nor a Dalit-Bahujan self got constructed as nationalist. Naturally hardly any power had flown into their mind.

But that nationalism had no social basis of establishing a level playing field wherein the caste and religious barriers could be erased and a secular self could be created out of all human beings where humanism could operate at a larger social scale.

In those days, we did not realize that by reading those text books we were going to produce a crippled mind that would push us into a culture of indignity of labour. We hardly understood labour was basically responsible for the advance of science and technology, as our parents who were involved in labour constantly were abused as foolish. We too developed hatred towards that labour. We too thought labour and education were inimical.

If we fail in our further studies we had no place to go back because shepherding, tilling, pot making, shoe making and so on were not supposed to be taken by educated as they were not considered to be nationalist professions. Many of us did not realize that that mode of nationalist education was going to make us powerless in otherwise imagined India of empowerment.

Our education in regional language slapped us on the face to say that ``you are misfit in an Anglicized universal India''. The prospects of power came here via a convent school that an ardent Hinduwadi would also go to preferably to a school of St Joseph or St Mary. We suddenly, at that late age, realized that national empowerment takes place through Self-Empowerment and that comes through English. And it was operating through a theoretical twist, of course, that English had come here through a conspiracy of Macaulay and we should be careful in allowing all to learn it. To enter into that linguistic domain and to learn the tongue twisting theory, we were too late in age and too weak in mind.

A nation cannot become an empowered nation if an exceptional being like the present President of India who could become a scientist having gone through hardships of Tamil education or like the present Prime Minister who is said to have studied under street lights� perhaps in Punjabi medium to start with�and became an economist of his stature and moved into that position. Nowhere exceptions empowered a nation.

Only when the social mass gets an empowering education that empowers the nation. As of now our education system had not produced a social mass that can translate their parental and communitarian historical science and technological experience into modernist science and technology. The religion-centric nationalist education kept all the religious identities on the national table to drive daggers into each other. The caste-centred cultural spheres made us treat each caste an enemy of the other. A real secular self, with an inbuilt sense of dignity of labour, is yet to be born.

A scientific temper that can challenge, our very neighbour, China, if not the West, may spring up if we recognise English as necessary national language to be taught on par with every regional language in every state from class one to every child. We must�and must�take out all forms of religious content from text books and teach dignity of labour on compulsory basis. Perhaps India then begins to empower itself.

                                 

KANCHA ILAIAH, PROFESSOR AND DALIT RIGHTS ACTIVIST