EID IS ACROSS THE RIVER (II)

by Jie Wu

Photo by Jie Wu

2.

After three months of soul-searching, I gathered all my hope and energy to return again to India, to visit Ramaswamy, Amina baji and all the dear teachers and students at the school. The school director, Ramaswamy, supported my decision and generously offered me a place to stay in his family house in Kolkata. On a sunny afternoon, Ramaswamy and I sat conversing in the wide-view veranda on the first floor of his family house in Kolkata. As he smoked a cigarette, he calmly said, “India is like an apartheid society.” He gently asked, “Do you know what apartheid is?” I nodded my head and replied that I had read some things about it.

A long silence followed and then Ramaswamy began puffing out some words. “Similar to the separation of ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’ in South Africa, Indian society too is divided along lines of class, caste, religion, gender… The Muslim basti-dwellers in Priya Manna Basti in Howrah are like the ‘blacks’ of apartheid-India.” Another long silence followed as he smoked and I continued meditating on the stream of words that had escaped from his mouth. His mouth now slowly puffed out cigarette smoke, enveloping both of us, as I tried to understand his life’s journey.

It can be said that it is quite a rare occurrence for a person of Ramaswamy’s background to start a grassroots organization in a Muslim basti in Howrah. An “outlier” if you put it in literal terms. Born and raised in an educated middle-class South Indian Brahmin family, Ramaswamy used to work as a consultant to the government in the field of environment and urban poverty in Calcutta. After several life-changing experiences, like the Hindu-Muslim riots in 1992, a long-term study on Islam and Sufism, and working in an environmental improvement project in Priya Manna Basti in Howrah, Ramaswamy entered into an existential struggle that eventually led him to establishing Howrah Pilot Project in 1997.

Howrah Pilot Project or HPP works towards the goal of “building awareness, capabilities and leadership for community uplift among disadvantaged youth in Howrah.” It is through HPP that Talimi Haq School provides non-formal and empowering education in Priya Manna Basti. One might ask, why should an upper-class Brahmin start a school in a Muslim basti? This might be the reason why Ramaswamy assigned the local teacher-coordinators, Amina baji and Binod bhai, to assume leadership of Talimi Haq School. Being conscious of his position of power and privilege, Ramaswamy patiently waited for Amina baji and Binod bhai’s leadership skills to emerge and gradually removed himself from dictating the course of the school. Most matters with regard to running the center are currently managed by Amina baji and Binod bhai. If necessary Ramaswamy steps in and backs them up, but he now devotes most of his time to performing the roles of director of a family-business and translator of the Bengali writer, Subimal Misra. Ramaswamy continued puffing out spirals of smoke as we both sat in his veranda. Quiet and pensive, I looked at all the people of different castes and classes walking past the three-way intersection in front of his house. Ramaswamy puffed out some words again: “The Indian social structure has been designed and functions in such a way that there is no intercourse between the upper-class Hindu Brahmins and the below-the-poverty-line Muslim basti dwellers.” Confused yet awed, I meditated on his words.

There must be some kind of implicit social contract imposed by the upper classes upon the lowly basti dwellers. An oppressive, silent contract, marked by blood and birth. Yes, birth – that was it. Since birth … no from even before being born, the basti dwellers were conditioned into lives of servitude in which they are expected to blindly serve their privileged ‘superior’ masters. If I follow along Paulo Freire’s thinking: poverty, illiteracy and structural oppression would be the major forces conditioning the basti dwellers to cycles of silent servitude to the people from upper classes and castes.

Let’s say a female child is born in the basti. Her mother is an exploited maidservant in an upper-class man’s house and her father is an exploited factory labourer. The child grows in the slum among her many siblings, helps in family chores and goes to poorly-funded, overcrowded government schools. Due to family financial distress, she quits school sometime during middle school and goes on to take up exploitative work continuing their parents’ work-cycle, until her marriage, has her own children, by chance she falls sick (due to poverty, malnutrition and inadequacy of healthcare) which leads to an eventual early death.

Of course, women do have the agency to take control of their lives, but that means they have to fight head-on against structural forces such as poverty, illiteracy and gender discrimination. Yes Amina baji, she is a living example of a brave woman who is battling the oppressive forces consigning women to tragic cycles of life and death in the bastis. And Amina’s teacher and guide was Ramaswamy, this man sitting and smoking in front of me, the man who had seen through these cycles of life and death in Howrah’s bastis and decided to dedicate himself to founding Howrah Pilot Project.

While staying at Ramaswamy’s family house in Kolkata, I was once again confronted by those innermost questions that I had left unanswered during my earlier stint as an English teacher and researcher at Talimi Haq School. Why can’t I fully connect to the teachers and students at the school? What is it that separates me from them?

From March through August 2015, instead of working hard to answer these innermost questions, I spent most of my time trying to develop a children’s dance-drama with this centre. Once again, I encountered major difficulties in trying to work together with the teachers and students at the school. First, I couldn’t inspire people to fully dedicate themselves to this dance-drama project. It might have been that this project wasn’t able to appeal to the teachers’ needs and aspirations for the school. Amina baji, Binod bhai and most teachers wanted to start sewing classes and a women’s health programme, but I had come to offer a children’s dance-drama project. Our goals and aspirations did not match, hence the dance-drama venture came into a halt. Later, conditions arose for me to go to work with Indian Chinese youth to start a Dragon Boat Festival, as a means towards initiating revitalization of the old Chinatown of Kolkata. This new project took up almost all my time and effort until the end of my second trip to India. My existential questions were again neglected and left unanswered. In September 2015, I returned to Lisbon to visit family and start on the path of a writer.

Read from Part 1 here.

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Jie Wu

THE DECOLONIZER
February 2016

Read the full newsletter here »

EID IS ACROSS THE RIVER

by Jie Wu

"Boatman Crossing the River" by Jie Wu

1.

It’s almost Eid, I thought to myself: I need to go across the river and visit the teachers and students at Talimi Haq School. The school is a non-formal educational center run by Howrah Pilot Project in an industrial workers’ settlement, populated mostly by Muslim households, in the city of Howrah, India. Here, students and volunteer teachers address each other as sister and brother, using the Urdu terms “baji”(sister) and “bhai”(brother).

A few days ago, Amina baji had invited me to school for the upcoming Eid-al Fitr festival. Eid, also known as the "Feast of Breaking the Fast,” celebrates the completion of – the twenty-nine or thirty-day period of fasting from dawn to sunset undertaken by many Muslim residents in Priya Manna Basti, where Talimi Haq School is located. During Eid celebrations, people eat special foods, wear new clothes, offer prayers, share gifts between friends and family and go to attend Eid fairs.

In 2014, I had the chance to celebrate Eid with the students and teachers at Talimi Haq School. For more than six months, I had been working as a volunteer English teacher and researcher there. As a researcher, I looked into how residents from Howrah and Kolkata (cities on opposite sides of a river) related to the river Hooghly (also known as the Ganga, or Ganges) that flows in between. I had hoped to be able to grasp the complex relationships between people and the Hooghly river in the contemporary context of globalization. I alternated my time between the roles of researcher and English teacher in the school.

After three months of difficult research work, I had hit a major wall. I started questioning myself and the motivations behind my research. Would my work at all benefit the students and teachers of Talimi Haq School? Sometimes the answer seemed to be no, and so I dedicated more time and effort towards my other role as an English teacher in the school. I thought that perhaps I could contribute more to the students by teaching them English rather than selfishly collecting data for my personal study and possible publication.

It was during my short stint as an English teacher in Talimi Haq School that I came to realize that I was infected with a dangerous syndrome – the White Man’s burden. This syndrome can be described as a seemingly selfless desire (in reality being selfish because it is a personal desire) to "civilize" and save the non-white peoples from their perceived savagery and ignorance.

The British novelist and poet, Rudyard Kipling, popularized this term after writing the poem "White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands”. In this poem, Kipling called upon the U.S. to take on the burden of empire, similar to what Britain and other European nations had done, in order to civilize and save the non-white peoples, whom he referred as "your new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child.” Although I am not "white", I could see that my privileges as a Chinese American, brought up and educated in Portugal and later in the U.S., led me to becoming infected with the White Man’s burden syndrome.

I arrived in India proudly armed with a Cambridge TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificate. I thought that this English teaching certificate and my previous experience as an English tutor for a literacy NGO made me more than qualified for the new teaching assignment at Talimi Haq School. I saw myself as the foreign teacher who would "save" the students from their chronic English learning problems. Direct in-field experience quickly proved to me how unqualified and untrained I was to teach the students at the school. For instance, my inability to speak Hindi or Urdu, communication failures and cultural differences made it very difficult for me to teach the students at this center. I also saw how local teachers could teach the students in a much more efficient, sustainable and culturally specific way than I could. I was humbled and thus began my ongoing effort to cleanse myself of the disease of the White Man’s burden.

My teaching experience at Talimi Haq School taught me about how there was nobody and nothing at all within my sense of ‘I’ – the egotistical teacher, to "save."

It was only my mind that urgently needed to be saved from its teacher-and-savior complex, something ingrained in the global system of neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism. English teaching, if not carefully and consciously undertaken, is a powerful tool of submission, domination and colonization of non-English speaking peoples, which in most cases also means non-White people. After slowly discerning the imperialism of English teaching, I took up the role of an assistant to the local teachers and helped them in whichever ways I could. I observed that the change in my attitude made it easier for me to get along with the other teachers, but I could still sense there was some kind of gap or invisible barrier that prevented me from fully understanding and connecting with the teachers and students of the school. I thought about this often. I would ask myself: What it is that separates me from the students and teachers at Talimi Haq School? Is it language, culture, class, caste, gender, privilege or religion that pushes us away from each other?

As time flowed by like the river Hooghly these existential questions lay unanswered in my consciousness. After a nine-month stay in India, doing research and English teaching, I returned in December 2014 to visit my family in Lisbon, Portugal. Back in Lisbon, the memories of India being with the teachers and students of Talimi Haq School kept returning to me. I tried suppressing them but all my efforts were in vain. What it is that separates me from the students and teachers at Talimi Haq School? Is it language, culture, class, caste, gender, privilege or religion that pushes us away from each other?

Continue to Part 2 here.

To support the project that Talimi Haq School is currently undertaking led by the local teachers, please visit their Indiegogo page here.

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Jie Wu

THE DECOLONIZER
January 2016

Read the full newsletter here »