Dinosaurs on the Campus.

DEB LET FLY that India’s education system could only turn students into dinosaurs.

Predictably, Anjum jumped at this. Anjum’s a Gemini: you’ve only to throw an idea his way and he’ll tear at it like a puppy a pair of old leather slippers. “What else can you expect when our universities stick to their Sepoy Mutiny syllabi? They’re Jurassic Parks, man.”

Chhanda, petite, babyfaced just-retired professor of English, forever the vacillating Libra, decided on a public defence of the system (though in private she mostly deplores everything about it). “I don’t think it’s all that different in other countries,” she said.

That irked the tall, fair Pathan. Anjum focused his well-groomed white goatee on Chhanda indignantly: “In which other country can you find dinosaurs grazing on a university campus?”

Chhanda smelt an insult to her clan. “I’ve spent an entire career on a college campus, and I don’t think I’m a dinosaur. First be specific what you mean.” Her second sentence trailed off into a gurgly whisper: she always swallows her sentence endings.

“I’ll tell you,” said Anjum. “It was only after the Sepoy Mutiny that the Brits invested in education in India. They believed Indians wouldn’t have mutinied if only they’d been educated about what do-gooders the Brits were. Inspired by Macaulay’s idea of creating a class of wog collaborators, right?”

Chhanda played huffy: “Maybe. And so?”

“And so,” Anjum went on, “by 1859, two years after the Mutiny, they’d built five universities: Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Allahabad, and Lahore. Their syllabi must’ve been drawn up in a hurry, right?”

“I don’t know; I wasn’t there”, Chhanda pouted.

Anjum fluttered his long eyelashes, and smiled sarcastically: “No, you weren’t. But you’ve just retired after a career chewing the syllabus they cooked up after the Mutiny. Began with the same old Romantics and ended with the Victorians--- where the Jurassic world of your university ends.”

Here I chipped in: “Only, when they drew up the English syllabus, they were ultra-modern. They prescribed poets like Browning, and novelists like Dickens, who were still writing then.”

“Really?” asked Anjum.

“You bet”, I expanded. “Browning came into form with his dramatic monologues around Mutiny time. Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities was published the year of the Mutiny. Thomas Hardy wrote his poems in the 1860s---soon after the Mutiny, then went on to novels . . .”

Here David, the tall, unassuming American who’d married a Malayalee girl, groaned exasperated: “But to go on with such antediluvian stuff to this day . . .”

“But can’t you see the design behind keeping things that way?” The Pathan would now come up with one of his conspiracy theories, I thought. And he did: “What purpose do these universities serve? The Brits wanted ’em to brainwash Indians into being their lackeys. Now India’s ruling classes use teachers the same way.”

Her alabaster babyface reddening, Chhanda shot back at Anjum: “I don’t know that I’ve been used; you tell me how.”

Anjum tore at his leather slippers: “You teachers’re made to dole out things that mean nothing to your students. What the hell in Hardy’s writing can the Indian identify with, tell me? But that’s the stuff and nonsense you shove down their gullets. They’ve to memorise so much irrelevant muck.”

That stung Chhanda to the quick. “I never asked my students to memorise anything, ever. Can we stop them buying bazaar notes and mugging them? Their parents encourage them.”

“Only because you teachers award marks for such muck”, Anjum retorted. “The idea is to cripple students. So they come out of those Jurassic Parks with yesteryear’s mindset. No dissent, all conformity, gobbling all that’s thrown at ’em . . . mindless zombies.”

“Are you trying to say we teachers turn them into zombies?” Chhanda was on the verge of tears here.

“I wouldn’t flatter teachers,” Anjum was relentless. “Teachers are equally zombies who never protest against the system. They’re groomed to become part of the system. They don’t even realize they’re used to numb young minds into torpor.”

Here David tried to turn down the heat. “Yes, but what’s the way out?”

The Pathan was in his element now. “The way out is for students to get together and shove those fossils away from their syllabus committees, or whatever they’re called . . . demand that students must have their representatives on such committees.”

“Hah!” Chhanda was now mocking. “You think students will protest? And as for students on the syllabus committee, Jadavpur University has such a plan.”

Oh no, not the J.U. hogwash,” Anjum moaned. “J.U.’s the CPI-M’s den. That’d be a CPI-M trick only to get all students in their bag. Brainwash ’em into their vote bank, that’s all.”

“How the hell would you want it to be?” Chhanda was sharp.

“You teachers gotta get students to be argumentative,” said Anjum, “and not gobble whatever you dole out. But no, you turn them into non-think tanks. Just what suits the ruling classes: so many unthinking voters who’ll never question how the CPI-M’s been ruling for three decades now; be smug with the status quo.”

“Three decades of unbroken rule?” said David. “Whew! And nobody has doubts?”

“If you can halt thinking, you can kill doubting,” said Deb. “Brits didn’t want dissent; our rulers want no dissent either.”

Then he added after his mathematical bent: “In India, literacy and illiteracy are directly proportional. Our educational institutes are programmed to promote ignorance about the ways of our rulers---so they can rule peacefully. Amen!”