Fifty years in love, labour and dream
By Darshan Singh Maini

WHEN a person has spent nearly half a century in the classroom, in the corridors of a college or a university, and in its halls and libraries, all in a joyful spirit of conversing with the greatest minds — writers, philosophers, critics etc — , and with the youthful pupils eager to be broken to the new, exciting and higher reaches of thought, there is a deep, almost mystical sense of fulfilment. For here is a vocation which, like the church, draws you, if you have the inclination and the energies, compulsively into an expanding orbit of relationships, understandings and commonalities. And as the spirit of teaching and learning grows upon you, and the mind and the imagination rise to the challenges and encounters enroute, one gradually begins to create a sentiment of belongingness and gets drawn into an abiding "Community of honour", to recall a felicitous phrase from Henry James. In trying to bring out the "spiritual" side of teachings, I’m not suggesting a freemasonry of sorts, a wayside cloister of worship and labour — a retreat, in other words to the arbours of word and thought, away from the heat and dust of life, from the hush and buzz of things around you. Though a monkish concern for the pieties and protocols of pedagogy, a passionate involvement in the mandate (which involves both dreams and duties), and a feeling of "commitment" do inform the tenor of my argument. I do not envisage any kind of disengagement, or alienation as a consequence. In fact, a teacher who has grown rich in thought and knowledge with the passage of time cannot but be an "insidey." Cognition comes as the epistemology of experience is vindicated in the great classics, and one begins to realise the truth of W.B. Yeats’s beautiful line, "In dreams begin responsibilities."

I trust, my evocation of teaching as a profession, akin to "religious service", and demanding a surrender of sorts, would, in the context of today’s state of affairs in the institutions of higher learning, invite sarcasm and smiles. It’s, therefore, important to state at the outset that my theme here is not the erosion of academic values, the desecration of university or campus culture, the dirt done on the traditions and proprieties associated with teaching and the rude disregard of classical continuities. This kind of long lament has long been out of fashion. The forces of teacher militancy and student wantonness and truancy, of low pragmatism and opportunism among the administrating authorities etc., broadly reflective of the state of our nation, now do not, as a rule, touch the imagination of moral indignation. So, for the moment, my muses are engaged at a different level, and I’m seeking to portray the passage of a teacher who draws his franchise from the powers within himself, and in the process, conditions his responses and his consciousness for the ordeals ahead. Salaries, grades, promotions, chairs etc., undoubtedly, are to be taken into any account in any reckoning, but the more important thing is the ability of the teaching fraternity to remain true to the salt of their calling even in very trying times. A visionary vocation — though now fallen on unworthy and evil hands — is not to be laughed out of the classroom or the commonroom because it has lost its primal impulse or promise. Hardnosedness can only harden the arteries of thought and imagination.

I am sure, some of my colleagues in the profession would tend to dismiss this kind of "idealism as sheer "cheek" or conceit. I’ve no quarrel with such friends and foes. They would be entitled to whatever is close to their head or pulse. One cannot legislate in such matters. However, in the commonwealth of opinion, there is room enough even now for the type of teacher envisaged in these musings . AndI know from personal knowledge that one could still find a teacher, here and there, even in Indian universities toiling away in an obscure library niche or corral for hours, and taking his appointed duties as a teacher as seriously as a small-time actor in a Provincial Shakespeare company turning upto do his bit with 103° temperature! It’s that kind of "fever" which ignites blazes of thought in one’s head.

Those of you who may be watching a Zee TV serial called Teacher would readily understand why a certain teacher in that college flock begins to evoke admiration in the end despite his "starry-eyed" idealism. Even those who were tempted to mock remained to love and admire. Such is the power of the committed self — the power of sincerity and authenticity. As an American critic commenting on Leinel Trillings volume, Sincerity and Authenticity. (University Norton Lectures, 1969) commented, "It takes two to be sincere, but one to be authentic."

It would, then, be idle to pretend that I’m not, in some ways, trying to say what kind of a teacher I had wanted to be. That I had set my heart on college teaching even before I got my Master’s degree in English in 1942 when the Quit India Movement had caught the imagination of the nation, only showed an innate impulse and a deep longing. Earlier, other options open to me — medical profession, law, civil service, Army etc — had somehow failed to sound the richest chords in me. Teacher I was destined to be, and a teacher I became one cold morning of February, 1943, in the Khalsa College, Lyallpur, a (now Faisalabad in Pakistan), day on which Nazi armies had stormed stalingrad. M y initiation thus began in that period of time when the cruelties and chaos of warfare had stretched the imagination to the uttermost. And till this day, I have not regretted my decision or my choice, for I still believe that teaching, despite the wages, gave me from the start not only intellectual satisfaction, but also a sensuous pleasure and a "spiritual" dimension. It gave me gradually my identity, my insights, my world-view. It was a consummation not to be made light of. There’s a popular saying that the marriages are made in heaven, a convenient shorthand for the problematics of matrimony. I advance no pedagogic theology to link my job to the heavens above, but I do feel some benevolent providence did intervene to turn me into a teacher, and thus brought my deepest desires and sleeping energies to the boil.

As a graduate student, I happened to read Stephen Leacock’s delightful essay, Need for a Quiet-College. And that dream-like evocation of a small campus away from the noise and the news and the brilliance of the world where the Central Clock shows the same hour day after day, and both teacher and pupil are bound in an invisible way. Or, when the imagination has larger requirements, and needs a university campus like Harvard or Oxford, hallowed by centuries of thought and research, and a search for the good life, one naturally turns to places where the spirit is at ease among pupils and peers, and where even the well-rubbed stone pavements become a promenade of promise, and the dreaming spires and the elegant elms speak to the imagination.

Such, such are the pleasures of teachings. Even if your life runs into all manner of creature troubles, societal pressures, familial agonies, political horrors etc., the residues of such pleasures remain to become in the end an abiding presence. And they help lighten the blows of fate, ill-health and age. For the spirit tempered in the smithy of thought and values and vision learns to evolve a dialectic of understanding.

But perhaps the most enjoyable or valuable part of such a calling or engagement is the fact that the classroom becomes, when you are deep in the books, a miniature world within world, and over a period of time, you help dramatise in it a whole theatre of life’s endless dramas of conflict and clash, of passion and poetry, of deed and dream. And once you’re able to create such an ambience, the students too are, sooner than later, drawn into that magic world.

Clearly, the teacher of my conceit or description is a teacher of literature and language, though the argument applies in its own way, to whatever you are teaching — higher mathematics, philosophy, history etc. The point of pleasure lies in the created and controlled vision in the classroom, a shared vision that gradually becomes an element in one’s way of life.

Each teacher, thus committed, whatever his subject, soon discovers his or her own teaching method, style and ethics. For it’s in such a way that one creates the dynamics of demagogy. Since my subject of teaching was literature — English, American, European, Indo-Anglian and Commonwealth at various points in my long journey — I naturally confine my argument to my own business. And in that particular sense, the feel and touch and pulse of life which the teaching of a great play, novel or poem can raise to a pitch in the classroom may seldom be seen in the case of other subjects. For, in art, reality reduced to ideas and paradigms is recreated through an act of the benign imagination in a transformed, heightened form. And that’s why, there’s sense both of immediacy and de-javu. It’s the simultaneous saturation of the mind and the sensibility.

In my stalled and unfinished autobiography. I have gone into some details involving modern theories of criticism as related to language, text and teaching, but here I confine the argument to the barest essentials. And I take the liberty to reproduce a few relevant lines.

I turned to teaching a time when my political imagination was in a state of turmoil, for I found in it a conduit for the appeasement of several cognate and collateral urges such as the lire of literature, the time for creative writing, the incense of ideology, the passion for a just and free humanist would etc."

"I had from the beginning the idea of making teaching of a kind of a long and passionate dialogue with the poets and the playwrights and the fabulators of fiction on the one hand, and with the students, on the other, clearly, the teacher’s own dreams and distempers, fevers and felicities are only an indirect and marginal presence when he’s immured in the act of recreating scenes of romance, tragedy, horror etc. For them the primary thing is the text. And yet the teacher’s own personality cannot be refined out of existence, T.S. Eliot’s magisterial views regarding the nature of poetry, personality and criticism, notwithstanding.

" To put it differently, I was always striving to create a classroom community of taste and interests. That’s to say, in that hour of teaching a great Yeats poem, or a scene from Shakespearean tragedy, or from the late Herry James becomes a part of the teacher’s, and, therefore, of the students sensibility and imagination. A kind of imaginative trinity of writer, teacher and student was thus created for the moment. The eager, youthful, sparkling eyes of the girls and boys thus vindicated the vision and the experience. And for a teacher, there are no higher wages or rewards. And when such moments multiplied into weeks and months, the teacher and the taught could feel a sense of bonding.

That’s how, I guess, one lives vicariously in the imagination of others, and achieves a sort of ‘second life’ even when one is gone from the scene. That’s the kind of ‘candles’ I would like to see lighted when a teacher is being remembered.

This voyage of adventure and discovery which took me to various colleges and universities in India and abroad had to end, one day. In any case, though if age and illness had not descended on my head like ominous ravens, I guess, I would still be in harness and teaching a graduate course or two at New YorkUniversity in a summer school, an old man amidst scholars drawn from all parts of the globe, and savouring the aroma of thought and word that sent me out on this long hunt a whole clutch of dreams ago. For I do still receive intimations and signals from those distant and dear precincts located in the "the Village", redolent of the names that gave America some of its highest moments in the world of art and letters.

So, if that dream must end a dream whose tenure began obscurely in 1943 and whose most strenuous and momentous years were spend at Punjabi University, a score of years teeming with the adventures of the imagination, and gathering at last into an abiding sentiment — I believe, I have arrived. And that’s enough for one life. To conclude, let me quote those symbolic lines from The Tempest, Shakes-peare’s swan song: "We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is surrounded with sleep."