An Introduction to India

Our three-day stay Bangalore was intended to provide us with an introduction to India and India’s education system.  To put this in perspective, what would you include in a three-day orientation to the United States for a group of people who knew very little about the United States?  In what city would you base the orientation?  On what key features of American culture and society would you focus?  Now keep in mind, while the U.S. is very diverse, and more so today than in the past, we have only one ‘official’ language which the vast majority of the population speaks.  We only have 300 million people, although that does rank us third in the world for population size.  And our history spans a little over 400 years. 



In comparison, the Indian government recognizes 22 languages, and there are another 1600 minor languages or dialects spoken in India.  There is no one language which the vast majority of Indians speak, and so most Indians are multi-lingual by necessity.  In addition, most of the languages have their own written script  (Lonely Planet Phrasebooks: India, 8).   This diversity can be seen on India’s currency.  The front of a bill has an image of Mohandas Gandhi and the value of the bill in both in English and in Hindi (image 1).  A statement of the validity of the currency is included, again in English and in Hindi (image 2).  On the reverse side, the central image varies depending on the value of the bill, but all include the value of the bill in fifteen other languages (image 3).  Notice the variations in the scripts.  Being literate in one of these languages does not imply literacy in any of the other languages.



Image 1: A 10 Rupee Note 





Image 2



Image 3: The list on the left edge of the bill are some of India's other languages.



Indian civilization is over 4000 years old.  One of the world’s first civilizations began in the Indus River valley.  One of the world’s major religions (Hinduism) began in India over 3000 years ago.  The list of Indian contributions to literature, philosophy, architecture, mathematics, religion, science, and medicine is long.  Today, India is the world’s largest democracy and the second most populous nation in the world.  It is also one of the largest Muslim nations in the world, despite the fact that less than a quarter of the population is Muslim.  India is one of the BRICs, with increased importance in the global economy, especially in IT.

So, three days in Bangalore to introduce India AND India’s education system was ambitious, but with the help of the Teachers’ Foundation http://www.teacherfoundation.org/index.php/home.html and Dr. Narendra Pani, we had an excellent introduction.  Dr. Pani focused on the post-independence period and framed his presentation as a contrast between two competing perspectives, one based on Western ideas and one based on traditional Indian ideas.  While this is a somewhat gross oversimplification of Dr. Pani’s presentation, the Western view has emphasized the rule of law, while the traditional view has emphasized doing what is right.  To me, these two views seem to have two different conceptions of justice, one that expects people to follow the laws and one that expects people to do right by one another, or at least the ones a person knows.  Interestingly, the three books* I read before the trip all included this same tension between Western and traditional values/ideas as part of their explanation of modern India.

The discussion of India's education system was equally interesting.  The Indian government has identified education as one of a person's fundamental rights, and this designation is an indication of the focus being placed on education in India.  The problems, however, are numerous.  The public, or government, schools have a very poor reputation, and not without reason.  So parents with the financial means send their children to private schools, but the quality of the private schools varies widely.  Some of the private unaided schools provide an education comparable to the best schools anywhere in the world.  Many of the private aided schools focus on students from the lower end of the economic ladder, and many of them are English-medium schools, catering to the belief that the ability to speak English will provide children an opportunity for higher education and greater success economically.  In reality, all schools provide instruction in multiple languages, and most schools provide instruction in at least three languages--English, Hindi, and the state's language (ex. Gujarati, Kanada, Bengali, etc.).  We were reminded several times, however, that just because schools offer instruction in these languages does not mean that any of the instruction is high quality.  The quality and availability of teachers is another major concern.  Lower primary teachers are not required to have any training beyond high school to become teachers, and there is a shortage of high quality teachers across India.  The Teacher Foundation was asked to assist one state with teacher training, because the state has several thousand uncertified teachers who now need certification. 

These two introductions may not have been able to explain everything about India, but they did provide lenses that we could use to help make sense of our journeys across India.

*My pre-trip reading list:

• The Scandal of the State: Women, Law, and Citizenship by Rajeswari sunder Rajan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003)
• India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking by Anand Giridharadas (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2011)
• In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce (New York: Anchor Books, 2007)