K is for Karve

Dhondu Keshav Karve (1858-1962) and Keshav Shankar Pillai are two exemplary figures in the history of Indian education.

Karve was a Maharashtrian who lived to a venerable 104 years and was given the title of Maharshi, apart from the Bharat Ratna. Rather than go through his many projects and activities one by one, let us tease out the meaning of his work in a larger context.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were many social reformers, and the cause for women’s upliftment caught the notice of all. Maharshi Karve, much like Ranade, Gokhale, and Phule in the same part of the country, left a special mark. He started the first women’s university in India, the SNDT, or the Shrimati Nathibai Damodar Thakersay University in Bombay. Alongside, he struggled to ‘save’ the devdasis and set up orphanages for girls. Our question is: what motivated these male reformers in their fight for women’s rights, and what did they achieve? A feminist perspective might hold that men are after all the enemies in the conflict for gender equality. A reliance on the concept of ‘patriarchy’ as the crucial factor in our social system might not explain why men would seek less control of women.

We are all shaking our heads by now to agree that things are not that simple. Many women have men as their best friends and quite a few men are known to demonstrate sympathy to the interests of women, at least until it impinges on their own. I would like to embark on a journey with you, readers, to create a more rigorous theoretical understanding of this man-woman conundrum.

Let us make no mistake: the bias against women/girls trying to access public spaces, education, professional work, is age-old. The protest against this, in myriads of forms, is also age-old. The oppressors of women have been women as much as men. The protesters have equally been men as well as women. We know more about the oppression than about the protest. How does a woman with no formal education, no permission to step outside the home, no freedom to pursue any kind of dream for self-development or self-realisation, no rights to own money or property, or her own name or identity—how does a woman protest?

She does have some sources of power. Research with housewives quickly reveals that cooking, housekeeping, childcare, are not fields of barren powerlessness and mundane mechanical activity, but full of the potential for exercising power—albeit, trivial-seeming power (exactly as most men have). We will go into the details  of such power under “W is for Women.” Let us just consider childcare and mothering here. A careful scrutiny of the biographies of the Indian intelligentsia shows us that the women in their families—sisters, mothers, aunts, grandmothers and great aunts, daughters, daughters-in-law, and, not least, female servants, taught these men as evocatively as did their formal schools. From the women, the men learnt not only a different way of being and thinking (an epistemology, an ontology, a philosophy, a culture) but also a way of viewing society somewhat from the woman’s point of view. When many of these men became reformers active in the cause of women, it was the viewpoint of the women that they knew closely that had been shared by them typically subtly and indirectly, but in a way that aroused their empathy and made reformist action unavoidable.

Thus it was with Dhondu Keshav Karve. To give this extra-feminist reading of his work is not to detract from the merit of it at all, but merely to contextualise it and help glimpse all the invisible women behind and around him.

The achievements of Keshav Shankar Pillai (1902-1989) were different. Best known simply as Shankar, he was originally and finally a cartoonist who spared no one in power. He specially loved children, however, and started the Children’s Book Trust, Shankar’s Weekly, competitions for painting and writing for children, a Dolls’ Museum, as well as writing books for children himself.

I feel we know too little about his life to speculate, as we did for Karve, where his inspiration came from. All this speculation (also called research) is for the better pursuit of these areas of activity ourselves.

K is then for kites, kangaroos and exotic cities such as Kabul, Khartoum, Kandahar, Kathmandu, and places such as Korea, Kerala, and Kumaon. What is meant by ‘exotic’ is the distant and unfamiliar, but also the mysterious, the exciting, the tantalizing. A story set in one of these places is sure to set the heart beating. My example will be A Single Shard, a novel by Linda Sue Park set in 12th century Korea. Winner of the Newberry Medal for excellence in children’s literature it is a glorious story of a boy who sets out to master the potter’s craft and how the laborious pursuit of excellence works. Like the best of works, it makes the exotic no longer unfamiliar but close to us. A lovely novel for around 10 year-olds.

Kumaon spells the Himalayas, snow-bound leopards, fierce goddesses, and mountain flora. We can’t go into its rich folklore here, or that of the other K places. But we can remind ourselves that kites are absolutely the favourite pastime for children at least in North India. How may we channel the energies that are bountifully abundant in the exercise of kite-flying into the joys of learning? The educator may wonder.

And kangaroos remind us to carry the south-south dialogue ever further. The kangaroo may have been long domesticated as a zoo animal and a decorative motif for children in the West, but is nevertheless a real creature whose habits and persona are extraordinary and deserve study.

Let us end with a cheer for the publishing house of Katha. Started as a children’s magazine in 1988 by Geeta Dharmarajan, Katha continues to produce brilliantly illustrated children’s books across a wide range of themes. It fulfills a task that in our vast country, deserves the service of scores of such publishers. And, it is well named. When we adults and especially educators, start telling more katha-s to children, then will the children of India and the world blossom and flourish!