In India, authors of biographies of men/women great and small tend to fall in love with their subjects and end up writing hagiographies. Glenn Khargonkor’s biography of Dr. Ramdas Pai, chancellor of Manipal University and progenitor of the globe-girdling Manipal Education and Medical Group (MEMG), which under his quiet stewardship has metamorphosed into India’s #1 education multinational with highly-respected colleges of professional (medical, engineering) education in Malaysia, Dubai, Nepal, and Antigua (West Indies), is an exception to this rule. 

This oeuvre is a biography with a difference, because while at one level it documents the histories of the founding fathers of MEMG — the legendary Dr. T.M.A. Pai (1898-1979) and his son Ramdas —  at another level it is a concise history of Indian education. Manipal and Beyond: Ramdas Pai and the Landscape of Indian Education also narrates the history of steady destruction of the subcontinent’s education system by the “colonial power”, and subsequently by post-independence India’s self-aggrandising neta-babu brotherhood, a floodtide which the late T.M.A. and Ramdas Pai spent the better parts of their lives to resist, with some measure of success. 

As recently as 1821, G.L. Pendergast, a member of the Bombay Presidency Council, observed that “there is hardly a village, great or small, throughout our territories, in which there is not at least one school, in the larger villages more”. Citing an official survey of 1826, Khargonkor writes that in the early 19th century, the number of primary-secondaries in the Madras Presidency (11,575) were twice the number in England (for a comparable population), with the average length of schooling in England being a mere one year (1835) as against 5-15 years in India. 

The first important revelation this biography-cum-social history makes is that education in pre-British India was almost entirely privately funded. Parents and households in every strata of society valued education and were prepared to pay for it. Scholars and teachers established gurukuls — often in their homes — and schooled children in languages, math and sciences, with rich households paying more and poorest children performing household chores to pay for their education. Thus an informal system of cross-subsidisation is an ancient tradition in the subcontinent, as are scholarships awarded to poor and meritorious students by rulers and merchants.

This legacy of the ‘beautiful tree’ of education that flourished into the 19th century was destroyed by meddling merchants of the East India Company, and overbearing upper class Britons (including Lord Macaulay who penned his famous minute (1835) decreeing a system of education to train clerks for the empire) schooled in British private schools, who were completely ignorant about the pathetic state of public education back home in Britain.

The sin of recklessly uprooting the beautiful tree of Indian education was compounded by “pitiless taxation” of the people and particularly the peasantry, by imperial Britain. In Case for India, the highly-respected American historian Will Durant (1885-1981) cites several conscientious British officials (Catheart Wilson, Herbert Spencer and H.M. Hyndman) who protested that taxation in British India was twice as high as in England and three times as high in Scotland. “Gradually the strangling effect of taxation of every possible resource proved fatal to the tree of education,” writes Khargonkor. 

Unsurprisingly, post-independence India’s establishment adopted a policy of disparaging — instead of encouraging — private initiatives in education. Inspired by the Fabian socialists of Bloomsbury and Soviet communists, education was transformed into a Central and state government monopoly with grand capital-intensive institutions of higher education (IITs, IIMs, NITs and thousands of Central and state government colleges) providing almost free-of-charge higher education to middle class students, while public primary education was severely under-resourced. How in effect this was a continuation of the colonial policy of taxing rural India for the benefit of a greedy new post-independence elite, is brilliantly exposed by the author in the chapter titled ‘Hollowed (Not Hallowed) Portals of Education’. 

It’s against this backdrop of an essentially privately-funded education system ruined by exploitative British imperialism and socialist post-independence India, which preferred to subsidise higher education of a disloyal middle class at the expense of elementary education of the masses, that the contribution of T.M.A. and Ramdas Pai to Indian education is narrated in this insights-full book.

The author who was closely involved with the evolution of the Manipal Academy of Higher Education into Manipal University and the globe-girdling MEMG and Manipal Global — a conglomeration of 55 education institutions with an aggregate enrolment of 277,000 students in five countries — provides an admirable account of how despite the sustained disapproval of Left ideologues who dominate academia and the neta-babu brotherhood, they built Manipal University and MEMG into India’s most admired private varsity and globally respected provider of higher education.

The true worth of this biography is that it is set within a deep and detailed historical context. That it has been completely ignored by the mainstream media is an indicator of public indifference to education which has cost the country dear.  

 Dilip thakore

 

Impressive tour de force

Anxiety about the safety of women in India has always been a topic of discussion in social and academic meetings. While articulate non-academics bemoan the continuing relevance of the topic in a developing and seemingly modern society, academics attempt to understand the underlying reasons for the persistent perception of women as vulnerable beings.

 This debate took a more urgent turn when world media reported the gang rape of a young physiotherapy intern in a moving bus on one of the arterial roads of Delhi during the night of December 16, 2012. Media coverage of the incident and civil society’s mobilisation to demand an amendment in the law led to the passing of The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 2013.

This law is also known as Nirbhaya Act, after the name given by a powerful media house to the rape victim. During the course of these events, world media declared Delhi an unsafe city while the Indian media gave the victim an alias which means the ‘fearless one’. The level of anxiety about women’s safety in the capital increased to such an extent after this incident that most women avoided being out late in the evening and when they had to, they were advised that they should always apprise someone of their whereabouts when travelling alone after dark.

In The Unsafe Sex, while acknowledging that the female sex is considered unsafe in India, Nalini Natarajan attempts to understand the cultural origins of this perception. The crux of her argument is that women are viewed within a binary which establishes and reiterates the perception that they are the unsafe sex in India. Within the house a woman carries the persona of “dignity, safety and even power” whereas outside the house women are considered sources of “danger, shame, exploitable weakness and vulnerability, open to male attack”. Natarajan spots this binary in Indian mythology and traces its development historically through the colonial period, in the lives of indentured Indians, during the reform movements across India, in the freedom movement, Partition, riots and in Bombay Cinema.

Through an engaging interdisciplinary exploration of the issue of women’s vulnerability, Natarajan leads the reader to answers for multiple questions. Not only does she try to trace the origin of the notion that the females are unsafe in Indian culture, she also attempts to understand the shock most Indians felt at the violation of the girl dubbed Nirbhaya by the media. Natarajan convincingly argues that Nirbhaya and other enterprising young women like her are perceived to be far removed from the prototype of the virginally domestic woman, and are seen to be closer to the woman outside the house who has traditionally been perceived as impure.

The author begins her journey by referring to Romila Thapar’s definition of myth as the ‘self-image’ of a culture to begin her exploration at the beginning, as it were. Locating the origin of the binary to the abduction of Sita and the public stripping of Draupadi, Natarajan demonstrates the vulnerability of women in a patriarchal, militaristic society. She follows a linear timeline to chalk out the increasing militarisation of Indian society through consolidation of castes, the power accrued to men through the ownership of land and the new encouragement for aggressiveness during the Great Indian Revolt of 1857.

The coming of Gandhi, Natarajan argues, catalysed society into blurring the binary. She posits that Gandhian purity, unlike notions of purity which are played out through entrenched patriarchal beliefs, would be attained by men and women who set out to curb carnal desire. Natarajan sidesteps the negation of the body in Gandhi’s ideal of purity but acknowledges that sexual violence faced by women during Partition marks the failure of Gandhi’s project for the safety of women in public spaces of India.

Addressing the westernisation and modernisation of the Indian woman through education and various reform movements, the author argues that the encouragement given to the woman, in the form of the daughter, by a modernising patriarchy is mostly coupled with infantilisation. Any radical departure of daughters from culturally accepted norms and behaviour is inevitably punished by authority figures such as mothers-in-law, fathers or husbands.

She further explores the latent violence towards women in public spaces through her study of Bombay cinema during the early decades after independence. Natarajan suggests that through Bombay cinema the Indian male was encouraged to not only dream the new nation but also the emerging ideal woman. In an impressive tour de force, Natarajan shows that cinema allowed the Indian male to ‘participate’ in building of the nation through the adventures of the hero while constructing the ideal heroine through his encounters with female characters. Through her reading of movies such as Barsaat (1949) and Gumraah (1961), Natarajan establishes that the city was marked out as the dangerous zone and the hills as Edenic, where the heroine can innocently display her virginal sexuality through singing and dancing, while similar behaviour in the city would become risky.

Natarajan clinches the argument by stating that the offsetting of the virtuous woman character with her wayward double leads the uncritical cinema viewer to believe that the woman outside the domestic sphere is suspect by her very presence in a public space. She states, “the binary — good woman at home, bad woman outside — has been fused into the heroine who is objectified”. 

Natarajan’s concluding chapter neatly sums up her argument that the binary of’ “good” woman and “bad” woman remains constant through the history of our civilization. While the book answers many questions it also provokes the reader into asking a few questions about this cultural phenomenon. It is an impressive exercise of following a trope from the originary myths of a civilization to its contemporary avatars.

Usha Mudigantil 
(The Book Review, July 2016)