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MEMOIRS
Back to school
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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Recess reflects themes that run deep in writings about school life and growing up.
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Recess: The Penguin Book Of Schooldays; ed. Palash Krishna Mehrotra, Penguin, Rs. 450
It’s the kind of anthology I relish and connect with personally: essays, stories and poems about schooldays in India. The first story I turned to is “Pornography” by Palash Krishna Mehrotra. An absorbing, accurate and subtle story a
bout a tyrannical teacher (he resents teaching Hindi in a convent school; his little son, who also studies in the same school, lip synchs Christian prayers at morning assembly) and the unexpected bond he feels with two students when he discovers they secretly read Debonair in class. Mehrotra is also the editor of this anthology titled Recess: The Penguin Book of Schooldays. (When I urged a friend to get the anthology, he said, “shouldn’t it have been called Bunking: The Penguin Book of Schooldays”?) The selected pieces are many and wide ranging: from an 1834 account of schooldays in Calcutta by Lal Behari Dey to the lyrics of a 2007 rock anthem about school life by the Indie band The Superfuzz.
Revealing accounts
In between are most of the usual suspects (Tagore, Nehru, Narayan, et al) though Recess goes beyond them to gather less known, revealing accounts of learning, several of them by women, and a few by Dalits. Some of these accounts of schooling are particularly valuable because they are from pre-Independent India (such as Krupabai Satthinadhan), and I was grateful to the anthology and its editor for bringing them to our attention. Krupabai, a doctor from Madras Medical College, married a Protestant pastor and settled in Udhagamandalam. There she opened a school for Muslim girls and later wrote her novels in Madras as early as 1894.
Ismat Chughtai’s story about seduction in a girl’s boarding school was written in the 1940s but is set sometime in the 1930s. A.N. Sattanathan’s autobiographical fragment notes the editor, is “a unique record of low-caste life in rural South India…written in…his close, cramped hand, from the first to the last page of a ruled notebook of the kind children use in schools.” There’s a sharp, contemporary poem about a schoolgirl’s inner life in Anjum Hasan’s “Coming of Age in a Convent School”. The essays, stories and poems that readers will recognise at once are those by our literary stars: Vikram Seth, Suketu Mehta, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Rohinton Mistry, Kamala Das, and Ved Mehta.
Mehrotra’s introduction to the anthology, however, feels disappointingly dutiful and impersonal. It could have been so much more fun, because Palash obviously has a thing for writing about growing up, so why on earth didn’t he write about his own school days in the introduction?
His conclusions are surprisingly cynical and even slightly dated: that you can’t really learn anything from school except the conventional. I didn’t learn anything from school myself — but that was in the Dark Ages — I know many friends, however, that teach in these new, progressive, creative schools where the curriculum and the teachers are making a difference in the life of students.
As the anthology reaches the end, there are many new contemporary voices that I welcomed. What nicely surprised me was learning that there are contemporary novels about school life and growing up such as Sudeep Chakravarti’s Tin Fish, Sharmistha Mohanty’s New Life and a forthcoming novel by Siddharth Chowdhury titled Day Scholar. Interestingly, nearly all the pieces in Recess about schooldays recount life in a convent school, featuring archetypal Anglo Indian teachers (and Anglo girls with ‘detergent white’ thighs), nuns and priests and sensitive Bengali boys ragged by school bullies.
Familiar cadences
Rukun Advani’s description of a classroom scene with an alcoholic Anglo Indian teacher haranguing a student feels familiar for the way he accurately reports the cadences of the lingo used then: “Albert ya bugger…your bloody dad is in the bloody army, ya bugger, and I have to buy rum in the bloody market…hum bloody paisa dega man, but tum bloody rum kab bring karega?” Many pieces evoke the objects and references that we know so well from schooldays: hostel life, mess food, the first cigarette, crushes, and being caned.
Palash Mehrotra chose these pieces to reflect themes that run deep in writings about school life and growing up: nostalgia, cruelty from teachers and students being cruel to each other, burgeoning sexuality, growing up blues, conflict with parents, class hierarchies if not caste, loneliness and miseducation. Recess is good fun and demands an antho of college days.
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