Saakhi: Why I Dare to Talk of Multiculturalism
In the age that demands uniformity of thought, ideology, laws and language, let me indulge in some time travel to justify healthy hybridisation and multiculturalism.
As a child growing up in a small town in north India, my sister and I were serial migrants, frequently uprooted from homes and government-run Hindi medium schools, mostly in mid term. After furnishing provisional school leaving papers we began attending classes in the new school, but realised that new schools used new texbooks. So, our books for the most part were dog-eared second hand ones, all that was available to children who landed smack in the middle of the term.
On certain occasions, if we found pages or some chapters were missing, mother asked us to copy them from our class mates’ texts which they lent us with some derision. But I do not recall if we were ever greatly disadvantaged by such swaps. The texts followed a pattern that was neat and easily assimilable. Despite the great upheavals that the late 50s India faced, Indians were adapting fast to democratic freedoms and the education patters were mercifully not doctored by politicians to fit an ideology.
Our parents were secure in their rare educational qualifications and natural adaptability of hill folks born to migrant ancestors. The Chinese aggression in early 60s had brought a great deal of focus to the neglected hilly areas bordering enemy territory. Roads began to be built, along with bridges and schools in rural areas. Our father, a committed educationist and a Gandhian, was asked to be posted to the hills to create chains of schools in the remotest areas for children of the largely poor families.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Yes, Nainital and Mussorie and Dehradun had private boarding schools run on the British pattern but only the rich could afford their high fee. Government schools were built on large tracts of land with playfields and well-run hostels for girls. They were also inexpensive but it needed an act of faith for parents like ours to send their children there.
I recall my schools in Almora, Mukteshwar and Nainital as merry salad bowls of cultures and languages. We had local students mostly from lower middle classes: clerks, school teachers, small shopkeepers. Some tribal girls came from the Bhot region bordering Tibet. Then there were the Terai girls mostly Jatt Sikhnis .They were from prosperous families of Punjabi refugees who were settled in Terai by the government and had rebuilt lives from scratch in the inhospitable area full of mosquitos and wild life.
Nehru ji visited our school once and being chosen to hand him a bouquet of wild roses from our garden felt great. Nehru told us we were the future – whatever it was – and we believed him. The team of middle level educationists the state department of education threw up had by then really performed educational miracles.
A few years later though, our two younger siblings were marched off to English medium schools. Government schools were teaching Hindi, but better jobs and better husbands were available by then mostly to those who were taught in English medium private schools. One did feel betrayed, but realised that adults can tell lies. My mother’s schooling in a multicultural Shantiniketan had given her access to many languages. Interacting with my convent-going counterparts further proved to me that after becoming financially and linguistically homogenous, families did not necessarily become happier or sire more intelligent children. Being upper-caste and upper-class mattered more than adults realised and/or let on.
In school, while my siblings read mostly European history, we learnt about how many ancient Indian kings and emperors and high priests had come in from other parts. In the history and Sanskrit texts we studied in the university, we picked up instances of injustices done to those on the lower rungs of society still continuing around us. Hindi newspapers and fiction in university reading rooms reported how what were minor doctrinal differences in the early years, were a decade morphing into all encompassing arguments over caste, communal and regional identities. Even within political parties, secularists and casteist thoughts coexisted. Reading about that was painful, but by the time we graduated, it had expanded the understanding of what a mixed nation we were.
Today, this sort of wistful time travel is becoming a persistent political theme on both sides of the political divide. One needs to watch out for obsessions on both sides of the divide. Most of greying leaders owe their education (that they claim to have anyway) to educational institutes built during the Nehru-Indira eras they bad mouth to the young. Would our entire system of electoral management and space research, mobilisation of masses along radically new ideologies like Mandal or Kamandal possible had it not been the free exposure of Indians to various available lines of radical rethink in various Indian languages about caste, class, institutions of marriage, property entitlements and gender equality ?
Most of the nostalgia the Right indulges in about India before ‘they’ came, one finds hard to swallow. Had one been born in what is talked of as Aryavarta, chances are as a woman one may have been unable go to a university, marry any man or not marry and not have children and not be socially acceptable except as a Sanyasini or cast a vote to create the Gana Rajya of yore!
Given the reality on the ground, it is unsurprising that upper-caste and upper-class men form the bulk of those who dream of a pure Hindu Rashtra today. Or like Tharoor they say children must know of ‘our’ mythology before western ones but English must stay as the main language. The rights and privileges that foment this double speak go back a very long way. Of course women in my generation have moments we can talk of with real pride, but we are midnight’s children. One of them is sheer mobility of mind and body we have acquired facilitating travelling, meeting, interacting with people speaking various tongues.
My mother, who was groomed by Tagore’s Shantiniketan, acquired undisputed literary eminence in her lifetime despite being blatantly ignored and/or rejected by the critics, the academics, the government-run literary academies or even her own relatives. It was she who gave me both my optimism and predilection for despair. We were a funny pair but broke glass ceilings, enraged the system, upset the family and many brahminical norms of samskaras and acharan, yet both of us found reasons in our lives to be cheerfully defiant and enjoy the company of those we really loved and cared for. By now, mother is long gone, and we have lived through some of the darkest periods in democratic secular India. But all this has taught me that there is nothing like a fundamental or irreversible change. All change in history is incremental and parts of it that trigger off such bloody wars, may in the coming decades turn out to be historical and naïve.
Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.
Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.
This article went live on December fourteenth, two thousand twenty five, at fifteen minutes past one in the afternoon.The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
