AN INDIAN RENAISSANCE

Development of nations as a result of human efforts and history has established beyond doubt that sincere attempts at human resource development plays a crucial role in this. This is where the role of education becomes critical. But what’s unfortunate is that the education policy of our country has seen more trial and error than genuine experimentation. It won’t be exaggeration to say that Macaulay still rules from the grave. There have been attempts to reinvent Indian education in the past, the two important policy initiatives being those of the years 1968 and 1986. However, lofty ideals notwithstanding, those policy initiatives at best proved cosmetic and missed the point that the first requirement is to unshackle the education system from the vice-like grip of Macaulay-ism. It needs to be understood that the education system for India developed by Macaulay was with a definite and far reaching objective — to instil some kind of an inferiority complex through a systemic design to perpetrate colonial rule.

The curriculum, the teaching, the monitoring were all means to make the Indian people realize that Indian-ness is retrograde and believe that the Indian culture and the Indian thinking was sub-optimal and regressive. Seven decades down the line it is still difficult to convince a large section of the Indian populace that we, too, can represent quality and excellence. Not just in technology but also in thoughts and ideas. It is against this back drop that there is need to revisit what we teach in schools.

The lessons, the curricula, the personalities, the history and even the literature. It is time for applying some kind of a business process reengineering as far as school education is concerned. The school years are the formative years and the lessons taught in schools have a lasting impact on the minds of the pupils. We still believe that Indian writers are poor country cousins of the native English authors and Indian literature is a substandard copycat of the West. Changing this mindset is important. Shakespeare or Wordsworth or Milton is not objected to, but Tagore, or RK Narayan, or for that matter Anita Desai, or Naipaul can also find place on the same pedestal. In fact, if Mark Antony’s speech is class, Nehru’s ‘Tryst with Destiny’ is no less a work of oratory.

And The Discovery of India is a wonderful piece of literature. On November 21, 2005, while speaking at the 37th Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture the legendary Singapore leader and strongman Lee Kuan Yew while talking about the role of India in Asian Renaissance, expressed his admiration for the Discovery of India as well as the ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech. Similarly, the more than 60-page note of dissent of Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya to the Indian Industrial Commission in the year 1918 is an equally elegant piece of writing. Even the Bombay Congress centenary speech of Rajiv Gandhi in 1985 is a class apart. Writings of Vivekananda, Radha Krishnan, Shri Aurobindo and Mahatma Gandhi all are classy pieces of literature and must find more place in the English literature courses taught at Class X and XII levels in India. It is time the framers of school curriculum at NCERT thought of giving Indian writers their due. Literary works of Indian authors are comparable to the best of the West but we somehow lack the mindset to accept that. The point is that if we do not recognise the worth of our litterateurs why others will?