The lost beat of sarkari schools

Recently, I met a young grandniece pursuing a PhD in Oxford on the impact of the New Education Policy on primary and secondary education. I know next to nothing about the policy but I do remember an awful lot about the state of primary and secondary education in Kumaon in the first two decades after Independence. This is partly because my father was in the state’s Education Service and deeply invested in his job. Also, as I spent the first few years of my school-life in Nainital, my memories of that time are vivid even today. As we spoke, I realised why a successful system of state-supported education had slowly faded away.

Advertisement

My mother used to say that Almora was among the Indian towns with the highest literacy rate at Independence. This I can endorse as I recall that virtually everyone who worked for us was functionally literate, could write their own letters home and were conversant with rudimentary arithmetic as well. One of my aunts had a cook, Daulat, renowned for his foul temper and tongue. As the Brahmin maharaj who presided over the kitchen in her home, he was also the pandit who did the daily puja. I still remember many shlokas and prayers he taught us as we sang along with him.

This was probably due to the fact that the colonial government had laid a huge network of primary and secondary schools all over Kumaon. Even remote tribal outposts, such as Munsiyari, had an Ucch Madhyamik Shiksha Sansthan (Intermediate College) established in the 1920s. This was largely to serve the Raj’s purpose and create a huge force of Class III and IV (clerks and chaprasis) for the colonial offices. For several years later (right up to the 1970s), the Lucknow Secretariat and the Central Secretariat in Delhi had several Kumaoni babus and chaprasis.

The teachers in these government schools were often the local pujari or grocer. They belonged to the village, were widely respected, and had a vested interest in ensuring the village children learnt their lessons well. Teaching then was not a profession but a calling and for years, these old teachers (Maa’s sa’abs) were venerated by not just the students, but the entire village. The emphasis was on Hindi, Sanskrit, basic English and arithmetic: the three vital Rs.

Alongside these modest schools were the posh boarding schools set up in our hill stations. Run by Christian missionaries, early students here were mostly English and Anglo-Indian children. Later, Indians were admitted but they came from the Army top brass, tea planters, feudal families — to become the future babalog. A fair amount of proselytising too went on under the benign gaze of the state. More significantly, this introduced a division between English-medium and Hindi-medium education that was to have a profound social fallout later.

The rot set in when India decided to utilise the bulk of its modest education budget to set up engineering and medical schools and universities. While this was a much-needed step forward to provide higher education to those students who could not afford to go to foreign universities, it also spelt the gradual decline of the erstwhile network of village and district-level primary and secondary schools. As English assumed a greater role in social and public life, no one wanted to study in the local sarkari school and learn just Hindi and Sanskrit. Soon, there were ‘Ingliss-medium’ schools run by private entrepreneurs who could hardly write their own name but charged huge sums for the ‘education’ they offered. You can see them everywhere now, some transformed into computer and coaching centres but dodgy in terms of the quality of instruction.

There is something else and that relates more to social and cultural anthropology than anything else. In Kumaon, Brahmins have traditionally occupied a very significant part of the village community. Some were landed but many survived on their learning and shastric knowledge. The temples provided them with a huge jajmani (as for the pandas in Mathura, Varanasi and Haridwar) so food and dakshina received from clients gave them a basic level of comfort. Added to this was the high sense of social entitlement as the learned pandit of the village. Often, they lived and died in the same place and so retained their links with students throughout their lives. This is now unthinkable and has led to a displacement that is difficult to quantify, but is a contributing factor to today’s social upheaval. The traditional respect for the guru and knowledge has become, more often than not, a deep contempt for ‘useless knowledge’. Information and digital devices have now virtually replaced the village pathshala and its quaint system of teaching.

Another interesting fact of this old system was that virtually no Kumaoni girl or woman remained illiterate. The heavy hand of patriarchy often meant that many were not sent to school, but home schooling made up for this. My mother spoke in awe of her blind grandfather, a renowned Sanskrit scholar and astrologer (this is why maths was at par with Sanskrit in the old Kumaon school system), who made them learn the Shabdkosh by heart and could spot a fault when they recited it to him. All those who grew up learning Sanskrit have tremendous mnemonic recall and could recite tomes learnt by rocking to an inner beat.

I wonder if that lost beat will ever return.