Rifts, Fissures, Cracks, Gaping Holes

Parvenu…. it’s not a word one comes across too often, nowadays. It landed up one day last week as my word-of-the-day, on the dictionary.com site I subscribe to. It brought back memories of reading ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’, ‘Scaramouche’, even Dumas’ ‘Three Musketeers’. All these books dealt with the outsider trying to get into a society where rank and wealth bought privilege handed down from father to son, where the land-owning aristocracy inflicted terrible blows to those they considered below them in status and power. Parvenu means someone who is an upstart, someone who has come to sudden wealth and position from obscurity, and is making a bid for a place in high society, a nouveau riche, Johnny-come-lately making a bid for the limelight.

The sudden spate of visits to India by important and self-important men and women from all corners of the earth signifies something that only the very blind and impervious will see as being a good thing. The hosannas that are being sung and India’s sudden high visibility make it most suspect; if it weren’t so frightening, it would be hilarious. The scenario has all the elements of a steel trap. What have we done really, to deserve all these wide, jaw-cracking smiles and lavish praise? It was not so long ago that India was a kind of pariah of the world community, we were constantly being told to go stand in a corner, whether it had to do with our too-obvious poverty, the endemic corruption, Kashmir and as an extension, our relationship or lack of it with Pakistan, our treatment of our minorities and yes, before I forget, our nuclear ambitions! But suddenly all that has been erased, forgotten.

India, strident, chaotic, often anarchic but newly-minted is the flavour of the season.

Two recent BBC programmes, last week, one on radio the other on television dealt with the theme of caste in India, one fairly subtly, the other without mincing words or images. “Being Indian”- a four part series on children from four corners of the country, born into low-caste families, examines the phenomenon of caste from the point of view of a child, and what growing up in that kind of environment means in India. In a world that is hard enough for the poor where education and earning one’s livelihood and food are concerned, the terrible stigma of being low-caste makes life’s blows harder to bear. The programme has the children speak of being excluded because of their, to all intents and purposes, invisible status; the visuals are painful in the extreme. When it comes to dirty work, however, the families are sent for. In Bihar, the child’s family carried corpses and dealt with the more unpleasant funeral details, as well as the cleansing of animal and human excreta, the carrying of heavy loads are jobs relegated to these poor people.

In the programme on BBC World Radio, the theme of excluding of Dalit children from education in private schools came up. This year a new educational policy directive has been issued to schools across the country. There will be a 25% reservation in private schools for Dalit children. The announcement has been received with foreboding in some quarters, vindication and jubilation in some and a sense of querulous aggravation among many.

The programme held a discussion among three people, one in Canada, one in Delhi and the third, a woman educationist in Calcutta. Everyone tried hard to be polite, at least two tried to be politically correct, but the nature of the topic was clearly something on which everyone held strong views. “Why do state schools function so badly?” “Why are teachers not better trained and why do they not teach?” “Yes, yes, we are knowing that only people with the right accents can get into English medium schools.” “How will Dalit children cope with problems in the curriculum, the barriers in the social system within the schools, lack of help at home?” One of the participants spoke of a move by managements and parents to fight the new policy in court.

By implication, what emerged was how natural and normal it was for any middle-class child to enter any school he/she wanted by right, if he could pay the fees and if he got through the admission process. What emerged was how selfish we are as a society in keeping one lot of kids out, when all it would take would be some real goodwill and acceptance from parents, school authorities, and primarily teachers.

Yes, state schools could do with massive improvement, yes, teachers often and often do not perform, classrooms that are all-inclusive are practically non-existent in the villages of India. They in fact, perpetuate caste, keep Dalit kids out of the reckoning.

All legitimate questions. I could not help thinking of my wonderful convent school in Bombay, decades ago before it became fashionable to denounce society, and the state, and the system, quietly letting in poor kids who sat in class with everyone else and in fact shone in their studies, getting medals and prizes, because they worked so hard. They are now teachers, doctors, heads of institutions, and no one questions their origins.

Getting back to the word parvenu, its use implies that every society, every country has its own peculiar unfilled cracks and fissures. Take the most obvious, what was once known as the colour bar in the US, the rigorous, unmentioned yet unmistakable barrier between blacks and the white race; in France where Human Rights were first enshrined and where the word parvenu was coined, the recent violent race riots that are likely to spread all over Europe has equal education as the chief demand. In England, the barriers of class are virtually impenetrable; so why are caste and its terrible implications considered so terrible? Is it not a human failing to keep sections of society down and outside the pale?

Language, history, science, maths, these are the fundamentals of any curriculum. Yet getting acquainted with these skills, if not exactly mastering them, does not make a person educated. What is that missing ingredient that raises a man or woman to the elevated ranks of learning and culture and a balanced world view? Just going to school may, I do not say ‘will’, confer elementary literacy on a person, but will it make him ready to embrace every human being as worthy of respect, worthy of granting the right to live with humanity intact? What is the essential strength that he/she must have not just to find a job and keep it, but to live in this world?

Can we dismantle the evils of caste strand by strand? Can we remove all the illiberal, intolerant attitudes from our society so that everyone has a fighting chance to acquire a decent living with everything that implies? It’s a hard, dangerous world out there, and the parvenu has to run a hundred times faster just to keep in place.