Wordsworth, colonial education, and us

GJV Prasad

Today, April 7, is the birth anniversary of the famous English poet William Wordsworth. He who wrote a poem that used to be a part of most English textbooks — ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, or simply titled ‘Daffodils’. Generations of schoolchildren in different parts of the world once ruled by the English, would recite the lines: “I wandered lonely as a cloud/ That floats on high o’er vales and hills,/ When all

at once I saw a crowd,/ A host, of golden daffodils;/ Beside the lake, beneath the trees,/ Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” Most children who recited it had no idea what a daffodil looked like! I myself didn’t see one till much later in life! It was to us a strange object, much like the apple pie that intrigued RK Narayan when he began to learn English — “A is for apple pie. B bit it. C cut it.” “Wonderful,” said Narayan. “We knew what it was to bite and cut. But what was apple pie?” His teacher didn’t know either and wondered if it was like an idli! All of them felt free to guess what an apple pie was, to make up the contours of the civilisation that was being portrayed in their books based on their own experiences and imagination.

How does it matter really? We know that the daffodil is a flower and seeing a great deal of them flowering gave much pleasure to Wordsworth. Just like apple pie was certainly something to eat, and it was obviously something the English liked. Much post-colonial angst has been expressed blaming the alien subject matter of the texts that the colonised were made to study. It is not as if we, in a large country like India, will recognise the flowers and trees across our land or the values our various cultures place on them. We definitely have no idea of our different food cultures and the taste and texture of many food items from different parts of our country, sometime even from our own state! Community, region, caste and class play a major role in what we eat, what is our comfort food, and what we don’t or have no idea of.

I have often shared an anecdote — an older North Indian colleague shared with me that a new Tamil neighbour in Delhi in the 1940s gave them what they assumed to be was uncooked food that they could fry at their convenience and eat. It was a return gift from their neighbours since my colleague’s family had sent over tea and meals when they had shifted in.

The next day, they fried the white uncooked food and ate it with some sour dal that had been sent to them as accompaniment! Thus, they had the nation’s first fried idlis! I asked him how they knew it wasn’t a sweet. “Oh, my father tasted a bit before we fried it.” Someone reading about it wouldn’t have known whether it was sweet or savoury.

But let’s get back to Wordsworth and the poem. The poet goes on to say how the daffodils lifted his mood. In fact, he was creating a memory — “I gazed — and gazed — but little thought/ What wealth the show to me had brought.” What it had brought was what we hope our photographs and videos of our vacations will bring us, but never really do, for we never look at them over the years, much like our photocopied books that we never read again.

As the poet says, “For oft, when on my couch I lie/ In vacant or in pensive mood,/ They flash upon that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude;/ And then my heart with pleasure fills,/ And dances with the daffodils.” When we take photos, what we hope is to make such memories. If I seem to be using this poem to make a didactic point, I am not doing anything different than Wordsworth, who drew many lessons from nature. So, whether we have ever seen daffodils or not, we surely empathise with the poet and can think of such delightful scenes from our own life. My grandmother disliked the flowers of Delhi and called it a cursed land, but she would have understood Wordsworth completely.

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