When I was alerted to Shankar’s cartoon on April 10, it struck me
like a whiplash. I am no teacher nor do I have children; textbooks are
a distant memory. In the English medium textbooks I grew up on in
Andhra Pradesh, caste, let alone Ambedkar, was rarely mentioned. Like
most privileged Indians, I was to discover all this shamefully
belatedly in life.
When a reporter called me for a "quote" on the cartoon row, I asked
her if she even knew where Ambedkar was born. Silence. Our textbooks
don’t tell students that Ambedkar, unlike Mahatma Gandhi, did not have
to travel abroad to realise what it meant to be thrown out of a train;
and that after having earned a PhD from Columbia University, he had to
hide his identity to rent a room in an inn in Baroda and was kicked
out when discovered. Dandi, yes – but neither teachers nor students
are aware of the momentous, Ambedkar-led, civil rights struggle for
water in Mahad in 1927. Most newspaper editors wouldn’t be able to
name the four newspapers Ambedkar edited and published. Any small-town
Dalit activist would know all this. Forget our MPs, the non-Dalit
intellectual classes’ collective ignorance of Ambedkar seems
pathological.
My concern over the cartoon in the NCERT Class XI political science
textbook, Indian Constitution at Work, is how children and
teachers in a classroom would read it in a society where caste
prejudices and stereotypes are still rampant. Consider the general
hostility towards Dalits and those from socially disadvantaged
backgrounds entering elite English medium schools, as witnessed in the
near racist opposition to the idea of including the poor (read "lower"
castes) in rich people’s private schools through the Right to
Education (RTE) Act. How would the largely non-Dalit teaching
community (who handle NCERT textbooks in English) frame the cartoon? A
year ago, the principal of Delhi’s elite Shri Ram School, Manika
Sharma, was quoted in The Wall Street Journal as saying that
she was "horrified" and "jolted" when the floor sweeper from her home
enrolled her child in the school where Sharma is the principal. When
saying, "I can’t sit across the table from someone who sweeps my
floors," she was vocalising the fear of millions of well-off Indians
who think the "outcastes" should only serve, stand and wait.
Now, how would Sharma or students trained by her read this cartoon?
How would their reading potentially impact the self-confidence and
self-worth of the 25 per cent – children of sweepers, shoemakers,
drivers, dhobis and vegetable vendors – being coaxed into these elite
bastions by the RTE Act? Suppose there was just the odd Dalit student
in a classroom, what are the chances of her different reading of the
Shankar cartoon getting a hearing from Sharma-type principals? She
would likely be shouted down, just like voices from the Dalit movement
are booed at by self-righteous upholders of "freedom of expression", a
term as carelessly bandied as "merit" was to attack reservation.
A snail moves tardily and a rotund Ambedkar seems to be slowing it
down further. Slowness is something "undeserving" "quota" students are
routinely accused of. Ambedkar’s whip is limp while Nehru’s is taut –
after all, the latter is the ramrod erect national patriarch. Ambedkar
cuts a sorry figure. Yes, the chapter in question discusses Ambedkar’s
crucial role several times yet stops short of mentioning how and why
his favourite project, the Hindu Code Bill that gave women the rights
to divorce and property, was scuttled both in the Constituent Assembly
and later in Parliament. But can we expect one textbook to do
everything?
Images and symbols tend to have a stronger impact than words.
Almost every ‘conscientised’ Dalit has a picture of Ambedkar in his or
her house, they are familiar with his trials and tribulations, and the
more educated Dalits engage with his key works. Ambedkar is a rallying
point, a symbol of hope, of possibilities of exit from the morass of
caste. In contrast, finding a picture or work of Ambedkar in an
average non-Dalit household would be as rare as finding beef cooked
with asafoetida – unlike Dalits, the brahmanical classes have little
to gain by embracing Ambedkar’s anti-caste ideas.
As recently as 2006, at the height of the media-fuelled anti-Mandal
II mania, students at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences
burnt Ambedkar’s books in the hostel corridor, made vulgar gestures,
shot a video of this and circulated a CD among fellow students during
their annual cultural festival. These arrogant and ignorant students
would not long ago have been in Class XI or XII, taught by some
Sharma.
Yes, political parties across party lines use this occasion to show
a patently false love for Ambedkar and his iconic status but remain
silent about the recent judgement in the 1996 Bathani Tola massacre of
21 Dalits, where all 23 accused were acquitted. But that shouldn’t
rankle us much. We live in a country where justice for real crimes,
like the 2006 Kherlanji carnage, is elusive, even structurally
impossible; a country where it is easier to win retribution for the
symbolic desecration of Ambedkar. And when Dalits are forced to take
solace only in symbols, who is to be blamed?
What rankles is how liberal and even left intellectuals, who claim
to be fellow-travellers of Dalits, have imposed moral pressure on
Dalits and Dalit intellectuals to come out and stand in support of
retaining the textbook in all its sanctity. Dalits have been portrayed
both in big media and alternative media, such as the blog Kafila, as
"emotional-devotional" fanatics who lose all "rationalism" – something
non-Dalits gleefully point out Ambedkar stood for.
My friend and cartoonist at The Hindu, Surendra, had the
tendency to show his "common man" seated, reading the newspaper or
watching TV, and the woman of the house always serving tea or coffee,
standing. He was unwittingly reinforcing gender stereotypes that RK
Laxman and Shankar had perpetuated, stereotypes which, it could be
argued, reflect reality. What if one such cartoon should find its way
into textbooks? Should we not seek amends so that children are not fed
stereotypes of gendered division of labour? It is one thing for a news
publication to feature such a cartoon and quite another for it to be
reused in a textbook. What makes us think these cartoonists are beyond
prejudices that the Dalit-free media they work for and the society
they are part of are saturated with?
This is just one part of the story. This debate has failed to
engage with what the textbook actually sets out to do. On reading it,
I realised it was radical in many ways. This is a textbook that uses
the word Dalit several times unapologetically. This seems a first,
given that as recently as 2008, the Haryana government ordered a ban
on the use of the word Dalit interchangeably with scheduled caste in
all official parlance.
Here is a passage from it that would have made Ambedkar proud: "As
early as 1841, it was noticed that the Dalit people of northern India
were not afraid to use the newly introduced legal system and bring
suits against their landlords. So this new instrument of modern law
was effectively adopted by the people to address questions of dignity
and justice." In the last chapter, the textbook proffers another
strong opinion: "Is it a coincidence that the central square of every
other small town has a statue of Dr Ambedkar with a copy of the Indian
Constitution? Far from being a mere symbolic tribute to him, this
expresses the feeling among Dalits that the Constitution reflects many
of their aspirations." But only Dalit aspirations?
In one scenario, the textbook makes students imagine that they
receive a postcard from Hadibandhu, a "member of the Dalit community"
in Puri district, Orissa. Men from this community refused to follow a
custom that required them to wash the feet of the groom and guests of
the "upper caste" during marriage ceremonies. In revenge, four women
from this community are beaten up and another is paraded naked. The
postcard writer says: "Our children are educated and they are not
willing to do the customary job of washing the feet of upper-caste
men, clear the leftovers after the marriage feast and wash the
utensils." Then the critical pedagogical import is driven home: "Does
this case involve violation of fundamental rights? What would you
order the government to do in this case?"
The textbook also underscores the limitations of the first past the
post (FPTP) electoral system. It says that though Muslims constitute
13.5 per cent of the population, the number of Muslim MPs in the Lok
Sabha has usually been less than six per cent and that a similar
situation prevails in most state assemblies. It explains proportional
representation and sows doubt in the minds of the student readers:
"The FPTP electoral system can mean that the dominant social groups
and castes can win everywhere and the oppressed social groups may
continue to remain unrepresented."
Who is to take credit for the radical language of this textbook? Of
course, the Dalit movement and post-Mandal consolidation of OBC
interests, which have created enough intellectual, social and
political pressure to warrant these changes. The textbook ends with a
"request for feedback" and asks readers to suggest "changes you would
like to see in the next version of this book". We first need to
acknowledge that neither the textbook nor Ambedkar is above criticism.
An online petition called ‘In Defence of Critical Pedagogy’, signed by
academic luminaries – mostly with upper-caste sounding surnames –
seems to treat the textbook like a sacred text, as if it were the
Bhagavad Gita that statues of Gandhi show him holding. If the Ambedkar-conceived
Constitution can be amended 97 times in 62 years, can’t a textbook,
which has to be treated as a work in progress, be amended?
Till such time, we can live with this textbook and celebrate its
triumphs.