Let's Celebrate the Teachers Who Take Teaching Outside the Classroom

On Teachers’ Day, one must think about teachers. My mind goes to Sanjay Kumar, who is recovering from the trauma of being dragged out of his house and beaten up in public view only to be berated by the deputy chief minister of Bihar and persecuted by his own university.

I think about Snehsata Manav of the Central University of Haryana, who adapted 'Draupadi' of Mahasweta Devi into a play to talk about the Draupadis of Chhattisgarh. She was hounded by ‘nationalists’ and harassed by the university for months for staging the play and yet is firmly in command of herself, her occupation of teaching. She has just sent me a paper on Han Kang’s novel, The Vegetarian.

I know that Rajshri Ranawat of the Jodhpur University would hold another seminar of the kind she held two years back for which she was suspended and had to face criminal charges. So would Sudha Chaudhary, who faced harassment and criminal cases for having orgainsed a seminar at the Mohan Lal Sukhadia University, Udaipur.

There are many like them. Closer home is Nivedita Menon, declared 'anti-national' and turned into a hate figure by the popular media for views that her scholarship has enabled her to hold. Or Nandini Sundar, who has been called a Maoist supporter for having written on the atrocities on Adivasis by the state as well as Maoists. Or Archana Prasad, who was also called a Naxal supporter and faced a vicious campaign by a nationalist section of teachers when her name was proposed as a member of the governing body of a college by the authorities of the University of Delhi.

The university succumbed and dropped her name. Prasad, like Sundar and Menon, continues to do what she knows best – to write on Adivasis and India's environmental life.

Are these teachers our models or ‘rationalists’ as per Upendra Baxi’s definition? Baxi, in his paper 'Teaching as provocation', defines rationalists as those who: treat knowledge as a set of exchange values; demand disciplinary loyalties; speak the language of ‘reason’; and stress the objective with an aim to create tough minds out of the students who would be capable of dealing with the real-life problems with a sound disciplinary training.

The teachers I am talking about are not rationalists in the Baxian sense of the term. Baxi would rather hail them for being hedonists. For him, the hedonist: regards knowledge as a set of use values; seeks to cultivate multi-disciplinary sensibilities; knows the finitude of one’s scholarship; considers teaching as creative communication that goes far beyond the confines of the classrooms. As opposed to the rationalist, the hedonist believes in a ‘soft’ training of mind with a ‘soft’ understanding of the multidimensionality of life’s problems.

Baxi is clearly in favour of the hedonistic conception of teaching that “leads to the politics of commitment to causes”, rather than the rationalist, who “tends to maintain a respectable, and safe, distance between knowledge and ‘politics’ of action.”

It is not surprising that all the teachers mentioned in the article have been blamed for being involved in extra-curricular issues which are often painted as extra-educational. We have been told that they have indulged in unteacherly activities and are misguiding the gullible students on a wrong path.

Such teachers have also been seen by the more serious rationalist minds as inferior teachers. They are often introduced as activists who go beyond their professional boundaries. Such teachers have often been blamed for vitiating the atmosphere of the campus.

The recent move by the vice-chancellor (VC) of the Manipur Central University to ban the teachers’ union found an echo in Motihari, where common people have asked the VC of the Mahatma Gandhi Central University to ban the ‘unauthorised’ teachers’ union to get rid of malcontents like Sanjay Kumar.

Baxi’s hedonists now have a new name: 'urban Naxals' or 'urban Maoists'. In seminar after seminar, people are being warned that 'urban Naxals' may be in the classrooms, on the campuses masquerading as teachers. Some TV channels also scream for hours to be alert against such ‘disguised Maoists’.

The silence of the rationalist teachers against the attacks on their hedonist colleagues is deafening. It seems they would like the campus to be less noisy. And if it is achieved by emptying the universities of these troublesome elements, they would only be happy.

These are difficult times for restive souls. But as the examples at the beginning of the article show, they are enjoying the extra-curricular battles.

Apoorvanand teaches at Delhi University.

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