N is for Novels

I was shifting restlessly among the mounds of work and activity I had set up for myself, the routines and lists, the systems and structures. What was missing—as I only know now—was a leap into the dark, away from my mundane, entrapping reality.

 

I picked up a somewhat dusty book from my somewhat dusty shelves (blame the fact that our shelves are all open, not closed cupboards). It was Maitreyi Pushpa's Hindi novel, Kasturi Kundal Base (Delhi: Rajkamal Publications, 2002). I relaxed and put my feet up. That is my privilege today. A few decades ago I might have opened the book balanced on one side of the table while I chopped the dinner vegetables on the other.

 

The novel transported me to a village somewhere. This novel's village was in British colonial times, and then after a few chapters 1947 arrives and the story becomes one of  independent India. Kasturi is a stubborn girl who revolts against her family's marrying her off to an older man for a brideprice and for constantly pressuring her to follow rules and tradition. She hates all the things laid down for a village girl. She does get married, but once widowed, follows her dream of getting an education. Meanwhile, her daughter hates everything her mother stands for and is in love with the village and conventional feminine roles.

 

I may have been reading with my mouth open. I was so shaken out of my world and thrust into another vivid one that I might as well have been levitating. If I could have closed my eyes and wished, "Take me to a distant place and show me what I don't know," I could not have achieved my wish better than upon opening the pages of this novel.

 

And yet, it was terribly familiar. The death of people, the re-location for work, the threat, persecution, and abuse of girls by men, the quarrels between mother and daughter—the setting was different, the situation eerily similar.

 

That's what a novel can do. The novel is such a powerful artifact that scores have been banned over the centuries, and continue to be today, in every single country in the world (see https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/17888209-list-of-banned-books which has all kinds of books including plenty of novels). Banned for being objectionable to religions, communities, and ideologies, sometimes simply because they promote democracy, equality, or an urge to freedom. The novels, incidentally, are not polemical. A novel, by definition, is fictitious. Like Kasturi Kundal Base, it may have an autobiographical or sociological base, but its success relies on its ability to create a world of its own.

In children's language textbooks we often see excerpts from famous novels: Alice in Wonderland, Gulliver's Travels, Three Men in a Boat. The excerpts fail to excite children, coming across typically as meaningless. It's doubtful if they experience an iota of the excitement that can be had from the original novel. Abridgements and extracts should be avoided unless we are sure they are masterfully done. Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare is generally regarded as an example of a masterful abridgement.

 

It's in Middle and High Schools that children should read full novels, in whichever languages they are studying. The literature textbooks with their random chapters in those classes perform a disservice to both literature and children. With a novel to read, a child of ten and over, can travel through space and time, get all the vocabulary and grammar they need, learn the values of empathy and respect for other, be suitably mystified and challenged, learn about plot and structure, learn to express themselves and construct narratives for themselves including about themselves—that is, understand themselves better.

 

The New Education Policy (NEP) 2022/23 does not remember to mention fiction, creative writing, or novels, but has been praised rightly for its insistence on some radical changes  and some creative suggestions. More about education policies later. 

N is for NIRMAN, or New Initiatives in Research, Management, and the Arts. It is my organization, so I am mentioning it, but there are hundreds of similar initiatives all over India and the world. Human creativity is boundless, and the desire to fight against society's injustices is likewise indefatigable. NIRMAN, founded in 1990, fights particularly on two fronts: one of social inequality by levelling the playing field, as they say, for children of both poor and rich families. It seeks to provide a model of excellent education for all, regardless of background. It takes seriously the different kinds of inequality and then tries to overcome them. Secondly, it pursues curricula that is integrated with the arts, imagination and hands-on work, thus making learning more successful, self-driven and life-long. Such high-quality learning necessarily stresses environmental and gender consciousness, and teaches critical thinking skills.

N is for names, such as the lovely names we have in India with the N sound. For girls: Neha, Nirmala, Nisha, Nupur, Nandini, Narayani and Niranjana. For boys: Naresh is all I'll mention, the name of my gentle, sweet father, Naresh (1924-2004), the lord of men.

In English, the sound of N comes often from the impostor, the silent k, and we can play around with children with knee, knot, know, and kneel.

Adults who are involved with education are experiencing two problems, one an old one and one a more recent one. The old one is a peculiarity of Indian cognitive and behaviour patterns but, it must be emphasized, it has serious ramifications and is not just quirky or interesting. This is the inability of Indians to say "no." Teachers I work with will keep insisting that something is being done when it has only been planned and is not being done, often for good reasons, but they just cannot say "no" to "is it happening?"

The second problem is the news. It has always been something for the reader to interpret, being meant partly to influence, and with origins in journalists' personal and political leanings. Now the news on television and internet is almost totally controlled by political and business heavymen. The majority of adults, including those in education, do not have the tools to be able to sift between gradations of false news.

Let us end with a pranam to Nanak, the First Guru of the Sikhs (1469-1539). Guru Nanak's rich biography and teachings show us his multi-layered connections with Indian sant, fakir and bhakti traditions. He launched an ideology that blossomed into a whole religion. His powerful invocation of the Unity of the One Reality (ik Onkar) and the role of the Word and the Teacher are unique legacies. Guru Nanak's dohas or couplets are part of children's literature readings—yes, difficult to understand because dealing with the adult topics of life, death and human relationships, but evocative in their sound and structure. My own takeaway? There are multiple teachers or Gurus. Gurus are to be found in history, in books, in the classroom, around us; but beyond people, the book itself, Nature itself, life itself—are Gurus.